Joining the Dance vs Analyzing the Dance (4-14-23)

Posted on April 14, 2023 by Luke Ford

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The Lowdown On Right-Wing Influencers (4-14-23)

Posted on April 14, 2023 by Luke Ford

01:00 Stabber Nima Momeni accused Bob Lee of having an inappropriate relationship with Nima’s younger sister, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/us/bob-lee-stabbing-nima-momeni.html
02:00 Nick Fuentes Space, https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1lPKqBkaEBnGb/peek
03:00 The Raw Truth About Silicon Valley Startups?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=147384
04:00 Milo outs Ali Alexander, https://twitter.com/JadenPMcNeil/status/1646596974190161921
11:10 Dennis Prager says everyone he is close to is because he is a public figure, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ2qOWLh12E
13:10 Dennis Prager’s Passover in Mexico, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP7MS4UoTDI
36:00 Nick Fuentes says Milo tried to sleep with him, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiFlD9buNms
39:00 Conservative politics is filled with gay pedophiles says Nick
44:00 Lauren Southern talks to Tucker Carlson about Canada banning guns
1:04:00 Charles Johnson’s raw truth on Silicon Valley, https://twitter.com/JohnsonThought1/status/1644125311590625283
1:09:00 Dennis Prager says he lost most of his income when he came out in Jewish life as a political conservative, https://youtu.be/NZ2qOWLh12E?t=2385
1:15:00 Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens
1:17:00 Julie Hartman and Dennis Prager on playing the game and buying likes, https://youtu.be/NZ2qOWLh12E?t=2151

Posted in America | Comments Off on The Lowdown On Right-Wing Influencers (4-14-23)

An Amazonian Exodus

Posted on April 14, 2023 by Luke Ford

From the New York Review of Books:

By the Israeli law of return, all Jews have the right to move to Israel and attain citizenship. The law was designed for those with at least one Jewish grandparent, and others have to prove that they are truly Jewish. The undertaking is a distant cousin to asylum seeking: How to prove one’s background and intentions, that one is not simply immigrating to a richer country for more opportunities? In 1990, as a middle-aged man, after moving first to the Peruvian Amazon and amassing a series of followers who joined him in intensive Bible study, Segundo managed not just to convert but to make aliyah—to “ascend”—and migrate to Israel. There he and his disciples joined a settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, caught up in a fight over who counts as Jewish and in a demographic contest with Palestinians for the future of Israel.

…Mochkofsky smelled a story upon reading an account by a New York–based rabbi titled “Converting Inca Indians in Peru” and—despite its inaccuracies, exaggerations, and inventions—followed the trail all the way to a 2005 meeting with Segundo in Israel. She brought the family nearly ten pounds of yucca from Argentina at the request of his daughter, who wanted to cook a Peruvian dish. By then Segundo was called Zerubbabel Tzidkiya and had developed advanced Alzheimer’s. This meant, she writes, that “our awkward exchange could not be described as an interview.” She notes that the book, though, is dominated by the voices of men, since Segundo’s wife and daughters, who at first had spoken to her, later “decided to step back.” Segundo’s son continued to answer her questions and supply her with documents and photographs.

Mochkofsky first published a version of Segundo’s story in Spanish in 2007 under the title La revelación, but has now written an entirely new book on the subject, which has been expertly translated by Lisa Dillman into English. Mochkofsky condenses an astonishing sweep of religious and political history from the Spanish conquest to Zionism, connecting it to Segundo’s story with a light touch.

…Segundo began to gather a group of relatives to puzzle through the Holy Book with him. For a while they joined the Seventh-Day Adventist Reform Movement, which in Segundo’s opinion at the very least got the Sabbath right, since the Bible so clearly said it was not Sunday but Saturday—sábado in Spanish. The Adventists were just one of the many Protestant groups trawling Latin America then—a quarter of all Protestant missionaries landed there after 1949, when China closed its doors to them. The Protestants could not resolve his questions either. In Mochkofsky’s account, Segundo’s character emerges as stubborn and profound. “But why? Segundo wanted to know” is the refrain. Why was God one in the Pentateuch, an all-powerful oneness, then suddenly three later on? What exactly was the Holy Spirit if he, she, or it did not appear in the book?

Here are some highlights from this 2022 book, The Prophet of the Andes: An Unlikely Journey to the Promised Land:

* Thus the Adventists believed, like other Christians, not only in the eternity of the soul but also in an eternity for the whole person, provided the person was a true believer. Body, mind, and spirit were indivisible, and therefore not only the spirit had to be preserved; food and caring for one’s health were also essential. This explains their militant abstention from drinking and smoking, and their frequent vegetarianism, as well as their emphasis on building hospitals and schools.
The Adventist Church would play an essential role during the Second Coming, the Adventists believed. It was the “remnant .” The term could be found in many books of the Bible and referred to those who, in times of widespread apostasy, had been selected as the keepers of the commandments of God and the faith of Christ. The Adventist Church’s unique role was to proclaim God’s final message to the world at the time of the Judgment and the second Advent of Christ.
Although the Adventists concentrated more on the end of the Bible than the beginning, more on the eschatology of Revelation than the deeds and instructions of God found in the first five books, the Pentateuch, which Segundo especially loved, the Adventists, he believed, had the virtue of adherence to the letter of Scripture. They saw the Bible as a road map to God.

* Just like other groups before them to whom Segundo presented questions they found inappropriate or irrelevant, the Adventists resented it. They were not interested in questioning their dogma. Segundo found that although he’d finally chosen a church, the one of the true Sabbath, that church had not chosen him.

* And thus, once again, almost a decade after choosing the Adventists, they were without a church. Soon, they would also be without their beloved publication, because only members of the church received it. They were alone.

* The group went back to eating meat after concluding that the Reformers’ vegetarianism was a deceit. Leviticus 11 , Víctor Castillo observed, listed the clean and unclean animals, and the clean ones, he said, “shall ye eat.” So why not eat them?

* the headquarters of the Sephardic Jewish Charitable Society.
Segundo knocked on the door.
It was opened by a man with a black beard and curly hair, the crown of his head covered by a small circular cap, knotted tassels dangling out from under his shirt. Segundo introduced himself as leader of the Israelites. The bearded man introduced himself as Rabbi Abraham Benhamú.
Segundo told him the story of Israel of God and the founding of Hebron in the Amazon, recounted the way they kept the Sabbath and observed feast days, and the way they ate, following the teachings of the Bible. The rabbi listened, moved and yet feeling a secret, growing unease. What was this highlander doing in a synagogue? What did he want?
To learn Hebrew, Segundo finally explained.
Relieved, the rabbi went to his office. He had designed a way to learn Hebrew in four lessons, a method that was used to teach children, and he’d written it down on a few sheets of paper. He gave them to Segundo. Benhamú also told him how to find the Hebrew teacher at the Jewish school who could help him obtain a Hebrew-Spanish dictionary. And he explained how to get to Stadium bookstore, in San Isidro, Lima’s most upscale neighborhood, where they sold a book called Jewish Traditions and Customs, [38] which children used to prepare for their bar and bat mitzvah, the rite of passage marking the start of adulthood at age thirteen.

* What the rabbi had initially feared was indeed happening: they wanted to be Jews.
Benhamú would later say he’d never doubted the sincerity of their aspirations. On the contrary, he would avow that they moved him then, and they still moved him. How could he not be moved by the fervor of a man who had gone nine days without working to observe Pesach despite being so poor that not working meant he couldn’t eat? How could he not be moved by these men’s genuine passion to be Jews? But if he had one mission in that far-off, faithless community where he’d ended up, that mission was to defend it from outside corruption.
Benhamú was thirty-two, and he had children; he wasn’t heartless. But if he accepted more Gentiles, the already tenuous identity of Peruvian Jews [1] —the colony, as they called themselves—would eventually vanish.

* Whether rich or poor on arrival, the majority of Lima’s Jews amassed fortunes over the course of a single generation and went on to form part of the capital’s upper class.

* Who, then, if not the mohel? Segundo learned that there was a surgeon, Rubén Kogan, who performed adult circumcision. Though he was a Jew, he did it not as an act of faith but as a job: he charged sixty dollars per person.

* When the “Cajamarcans”—as the members of the colony called them, as a reminder of where the newcomers came from—entered the synagogue, the men and women who were casual about their religion but strict with regard to their class could not hide their displeasure. After all, what, if not the desire to climb the social ladder, could bring such people to their synagogue?

* Benhamú sought out Lima’s other Orthodox rabbi, who led the Ashkenazi synagogue. They decided to tackle the matter together and summoned Segundo to a meeting. Excited, he recounted his story, described his studies and his path, and concluded by invoking Isaiah’s prophecy foretelling the day when all men would be members of the people of Israel: “For I know their works and their thoughts: it shall come, that I will gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come, and see my glory.”
The rabbis grew alarmed. The man was messianic! Judaism had resisted supposed messiahs and their followers for many centuries, but the Protestant Reformation had ushered in a new species: Christian Hebraists, Protestants who learned Hebrew in order to comprehend the Book and ended up becoming convinced that it was necessary to convert all Jews as some sort of precondition for the Second Coming.
Shaken, the rabbis sent Segundo off and sequestered themselves in council. “I want nothing to do with him,” Benhamú announced. The Ashkenazi rabbi agreed. They told Segundo he was persona non grata and cut off all contact with him.

* The New Testament was false.
The Old Testament, the Jewish Bible, contained God’s only true message.
One by one, Segundo took the treasured Bibles from his library and proceeded to rip from them the false, Christian portion.

* Even in the face of these bewildering new realities, the Bnei Moshe, whose numbers were minuscule by comparison, were considered stranger than anything else. Neither the press nor Israeli society knew how to describe them. Without realizing how offensive it was to them, journalists called them “Indianim.” One commentator claimed that their faces “would fit beautifully in a Life Magazine photographic essay entitled ‘The people of the Andes.’ ” [31] And the correspondent from The Jewish Week observed that “the Peruvian men were outfitted, like other Elon Moreh residents, in jeans, sneakers and colorful knit kippot. Only their dark complexions and distinctive South American features set them apart.” [32]
They were an exotic, unclassifiable element in a nation accustomed to splintering into very specific tribes. Very soon they would be forced to pick one.

* Outside the settlements were the secular Jews, whom the Bnei Moshe found distasteful. They shouted when they spoke and didn’t seem to care about pleasantries. In Peru people spoke softly, using exaggerated politeness: How are you doing? May you have a nice day, friend; I wish you well, brother. Here, Yehoshua laughed, people got right in one another’s faces, as if they were going to fight, even if nothing happened.
Inside the settlements, differences—even among the Orthodox, even within a small settlement like Elon Moreh—could be disconcerting. There were the modern Orthodox Jews, who lived in the secular world and served in the army. Then there were the ultra-Orthodox, the Haredim, who lived in isolation from the modern world: the men dedicated themselves wholly to studying the Torah, and their children did not serve in the army. Some of them opposed the State of Israel, convinced that Israel could exist only after the coming of the Messiah. Others believed that their rabbi, who lived in Brooklyn, was the Messiah: you could tell who they were by the flags with messianic crowns flying from their roofs.

* The grandchildren of the first Bnei Moshe were called up to do obligatory military service; their families were proud. When one boy confessed, crying, that the army was too hard and he didn’t want to return, his father was furious. “Do you want them to think we’re not men? You must be a man and serve in the army like a man, and if you must die, you die.”

* And it was amid this war of influences, fears, and jealousies that Zerubbabel returned to El Milagro in 2003, thirteen years after he’d left. Wisely, he began by convening, one by one, those he knew from the past. But very few of them actually went to see him. He had no access to the conversion lists, they knew. So what was the point of meeting with him?
What’s more, the few who did expressed alarm.
“Señor Segundo is acting a little strange,” said José Urquiza, one of El Milagro’s new Inca Jews.
“He doesn’t believe in the sages,” Agustín Araujo, leader of the Cajamarca Inca Jews, confirmed.
Lucy Valderrama confirmed that Segundo had stopped following Jewish law.
This was substantiated by a warning that arrived from Israel: The rabbis at Elon Moreh and Kfar Tapuach said that Zerubbabel rejected the sages, the Oral Torah. Anyone who spoke to him risked being censured by the new beit din.

* Thus the isolation Zerubbabel had felt at Kfar Tapuach followed him to Trujillo. There, they had let him down; here, they wouldn’t even hear him out. In order to tackle the situation head-on, one day he showed up at the El Milagro synagogue. During prayers, he told everyone that things in Israel were not what they thought; they were wrong.

* Embittered, Zerubbabel tried to demand the synagogue’s property. It was his, he claimed, but he was willing to sell it. In truth, it was not his. His daughters had donated the land, the cost of construction had been borne by all, and no property deed existed. But he had been the pioneer, the teacher, the leader who had made it possible for them to dream of Israel, even if they refused to admit it. They owed him, and this was the only way of making them pay.
Nobody replied.
With no recognition, no followers, and no other choice, Zerubbabel was forced to return to Kfar Tapuach.

* Seven years after the death of Zerubbabel/Segundo, the Inca Jews were no longer an anomaly. In addition to the Jews of Bello, other groups and leaders were coming to similar conclusions on their own, leaving the Catholic Church or the evangelical or Pentecostal churches they’d grown up in, going through a transitional phase with messianism—or not—and finally coming to Judaism. In Colombia alone, there were more than thirty communities in Bogotá, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Santa Marta, Cúcuta, Villavicencio, Valledupar, Montería, Sincelejo, Corozal, Bucaramanga, Melgar, Ibagué, Neiva, Garzón, and Cali; in Medellín two other groups emerged, independent of Rabbi Villegas’s.
In Peru, in addition to the Inca Jews of Cajamarca and Trujillo, there were new communities in the Lima neighborhood of Los Olivos, and other independent communities had been established in Huánuco and Tarapoto. In Ecuador there were three thousand followers among seven groups: five in Guayaquil, one in Quito, and another in Zaruma. In Brazil, new groups were established in São Paulo, Ubatuba, Goiânia, Tatuapé, and Bahia, and every month another one seemed to spring up somewhere. Mexico had a dozen communities spread across Mexico City, Mexicali, San Miguel de Allende, Ciudad Juárez, Saltillo, Guadalajara, Xalapa, Morelia, and Tijuana; no one had counted their members. In Venezuela, there were four growing groups in Maracay, San Cristóbal, Maracaibo, and Cagua. In Guatemala City, eight families were awaiting conversion. In El Salvador there were a hundred people between the two communities found in San Salvador and Armenia. Nicaragua had one group in Managua and another in Granada. In Costa Rica, there was a group in Alajuela. And more in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Bolivia, and Chile.
Traditional Jewish leaders in Latin America looked on in alarm as, generation after generation, their communities shrank through assimilation and interfaith marriage, but they refused to accept the newly emerging Judaism that eclipsed them in religious fervor and, in many places, in number. Rejected in their home countries, Latin America’s new Jews committed themselves to anyone willing to help them, whether they be North American Orthodox and Reform rabbis who saw their emergence as a divine sign or an opportunity for personal enrichment; the handful of Latin American Conservative rabbis disgusted by the way traditional communities rejected them, which they saw as racism or classism; or Kulanu, the American proselytizing organization that had supported Rabbi Zuber’s trip to Peru and sent volunteers to offer spiritual support wherever they could.

* By the early 2010s the Israeli religious establishment and the Chief Rabbinate had grown alarmed. “Israel may decide if it wishes to become the welfare state of the third world,” warned Chief Rabbi David Lau, the son of Meir Lau, “but so long as it has not chosen to do so—it should stop the immigration of non-Jews.” [2] New restrictions were created against conversions performed outside Israel; scores of Orthodox rabbis were deemed too progressive and blacklisted; the minister of the interior, who approves all immigration requests, added new layers of requirements. Aliyah became practically impossible to the Latin American converts.

Posted in Adventist, Conversion, Judaism | Comments Off on An Amazonian Exodus

The Raw Truth About Silicon Valley Startups?

Posted on April 14, 2023 by Luke Ford

Jan. 17, 2019, 4:18 PM PST, By Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins for NBC News:

An alt-right activist who met with two Republican congressmen to discuss “DNA” and “genetics” posted on Facebook that he believes Muslims are “genetically different in their propensity for violence or rape” and linked to stories about how African-Americans “possessed a ‘violence’ gene.”

…Johnson is best known for his conspiracy-filled right-wing news websites, connections to white supremacists, and downplaying the severity of the Holocaust in an online forum.

…Over the years, Johnson has shown a steady interest in DNA — both the genetic makeup of politicians and the links he draws between DNA, race, intelligence and predisposition for criminality.

…In May 2017, Johnson shared a post with the headline “African Americans possess ‘violence’ gene, researchers find” from a fringe website. The article’s author is anonymous, and anyone can post to the site. The previous year, Johnson linked to a news report about the assault of a white teen by black girls and wrote “They mean to exterminate us” above the link.

In February 2016, he implored people to “Google the MAO-A gene.” The Google search results for “MAO-A” often feature debunked articles attempting to tie race to violence.

“It’s the genetics,” he wrote.

Earlier in that same month, Johnson posted to Facebook, “Asians are smarter. It’s in the genes, man.”

Johnson has also attempted to link the genes of Muslims, who are members of a religion and not a specific ethnic group, to a genetic predisposition to violence.

“We don’t want to talk about inbreeding and how it leads to mental illness in Muslim populations. It’s too taboo,” Johnson wrote on Dec. 4, 2015.

“We also don’t talk about how they are genetically different in their propensity for violence or rape even though the empirical evidence is overwhelming.”

…Dr. Paige Harden, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas-Austin who focuses on antisocial behavior, told NBC News that Johnson’s understanding of the MAO-A gene is “wrong on basically every level that it’s possible to be wrong.”

“Work (on the MAO-A gene) has now been largely discredited, because we now know that human behaviors are not influenced by single genes with large effects—they are influenced by lots and lots and lots—think thousands—of genetic variants, each of which has a tiny effect,” said Harden. “Bottom line: MAO-A likely doesn’t matter for aggression or antisocial behavior.”

“I don’t agree with everything I have posted on Facebook and I don’t think anyone does,” Johnson told NBC News. “Asking me to defend my views on Facebook is a little absurd.”

“I defer to the best scientists in the field, like James Watson.”

Watson, a 90-year-old Nobel prize-winner, widely known as one of the fathers of DNA, was recently stripped of his titles by the laboratory where he completed most of his research for “misuse of science to justify prejudice,” including the belief that Africans are less intelligent than Europeans.

…Since the shuttering of his far-right conspiracy websites, GotNews and WeSearchr, Johnson has laid low, citing the alleged censorship of conservatives.

In June 2018, Johnson posted that he had “just met with about fifteen members of Congress today” and planned to “meet with a Cabinet member” about tech censorship.

In a Reddit “ask me anything” question-and-answer session in 2017, Johnson said he believed the “Allied bombings of Germany were a war crime” and that he agreed with a false theory “about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.”

“There were a number of sources that disputed the six million figure and I find myself in that camp reluctantly,” he wrote in January 2017. “Of course you can’t really discuss any of this stuff without being called a Holocaust denier which I am not.”

Chuck Johnson responds in 2021.

I think Chuck Johnson is brilliant, connected, but frequently lacking in good judgment. He’s painfully right and painfully wrong so often that it is hard to get a handle on him.

Johnson is worth watching because he has the stuff (intelligence and connections) that can change the world.

Chuck Johnson blogs April 5, 2023:

Last night brought news that prolific investor Bob Lee was murdered in a stabbing.

He was killed around 2.35 AM in the Rincon Hill neighborhood, which is about a five minute walk to Chinatown. Not a lot of good stuff goes on at that time of night in downtown San Francisco and Lee really liked drugs. I’ve been around there and it’s not good at night.

Lee was also the Cash App founder and the chief product of MobileCoin.

Cash App has been linked to all kinds of money laundering, which you can peruse in the report that short seller Hindenburg released.

The Washington Post has the story:

“Former employees described how Cash App suppressed internal concerns and ignored user pleas for help as criminal activity and fraud ran rampant on its platform,” the report alleged. It also estimated, based on interviews with former employees, that 40 percent to 70 percent of accounts are “fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual.”

Mobile Coin was backed by Binance, which is under all kinds of investigation by the U.S. and allied governments.

I’ve made some calls. A friend witnessed him doing hard drugs dozens of times.

Let’s be clear: Lee liked drugs. Lee bought drugs. Lee also liked orgies. Lee liked crypto.

Does that remind you of anyone? [Sam Bankman-Fried]

In the Wirecard case we saw how many of the executives and regulators got compromised by drugs and prostitutes — and how they looked the other way on enforcement precisely because they were dirty.

These raises another question. Is the same thing happening in American fintech?

Could the Square CTO have been involved in some shady stuff? Of course he was.

And he isn’t alone. There have been all kinds of crypto people who have died under very suspicious circumstances.

There’s a temptation to blame San Francisco for these kind of problems but the problems of San Francisco is how many tech guys wanted to be residents rather than citizens.

In fact the blood is on the hands of investors like Ocko (who is deeply tied into the Chinese too). Don’t take my word for it.

Here’s Ocko again.

“My family has been working with the Chinese government at a reasonably high level since the late 1970s, starting with my dad, and I kind of grew up in that environment. And at a relatively young age, as a professional [in the 1990s], I started pro bono helping my dad, who’s a Chinese legal expert, on things like constructing the laws around China’s Nasdaq equivalent, its stock markets, the joint dollar-renminbi investment legislation, advice on technology development and venture capital development.”

Actually, Mark, you and the rest of Silicon Valley had the opportunity to invest in law enforcement tech and you didn’t. You invested in fake companies like Curative which got billions and didn’t even work.

That’s why Bob Lee died. Your city banned facial recognition — your firm actually saw Clearview but refused and leaked on it to BuzzFeed — and passed on genomic genealogy — which is pretty much the only way we’d be able to solve this kind of case.

You didn’t want to have the China-mob ties conversation. This is why you lost your friend and this is why you’ll lose others.

Chuck Johnson blogs April 4:

The implication here is that I’m somehow bad for wanting the United States to enforce immigration law — something every other serious country does — and therefore deserving of jailing, or perhaps suiciding, in the same way as Aaron Swartz, the cofounder of Reddit. (I’ve repeatedly and explicitly been against jailing Swartz, Ross Ulbricht, and other young nonviolent hacker types but that’s for another time.)

What I find interesting here is the view that wanting to have facial recognition necessarily leads to an anti-immigrant future. It’s compelling but doesn’t logically follow.

For example: if the state had a tighter, firmer control on immigration it could well be the case that the United States would take more immigrant guest workers rather than fewer simply because we’d know who and where they are. We need only to look at how Australia, Canada, or the Gulf States do immigration to see that that could well work.

I agree with David Frum: if liberals don’t enforce borders, fascists will. We’re entering a period where the enemies of the United States use migration as a weapon—as a means of disrupting and disturbing our already strained social welfare system…

The real story is the capital flows between China and America and how China appointed the foreign children to superintend their investments. China built these people up as a kind of new founding. You know their names. Levchin. Thiel. Sacks. Nosek. Khosla. Musk. Pan.

These are the leaders to be appointed over you. They are the new “founders” of America.

Chuck Johnson blogs April 4:

I think Flatley could help us sweep the Chinese-penetrated companies of Ancestry and 23andMe.com. Did you know that 23AndMe lost $90 million last quarter? And that it’s two earliest investors were Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein? Yikes!

Johnson blogs March 28:

…PayPal was a means of moving money all around the world after the Cold War, so, too, was crypto. Taken seriously, crypto has served as a kind of money laundering/criminal index. When it booms the criminal underworld is moving money.

…PayPal started with the idea of being able to “beam” one another money. (When David Sacks took over it really became about money laundering.)

…It’s now possible to give every single person on the planet a card with a chip in it — and to send money directly to that card. If the money moves out of a geographic area the cards can be turned off.

Johnson blogs March 27:

One of the major reasons I left journalism for investing is that there was no way to capture being right. I regret spending as much time in ideological circles. I was a sucker but I was attracted by abstraction, by “muh principles.” Like a lot of stupid smart people I wanted to be seen a certain way instead of actually being smart.

…A major reason I didn’t take the vaccine was that some of the very same people who advocated for the Iraq War were also pushing the vaccine quite hard.

…I’ve become convinced that BAP, like Claremont, is about getting you to do something crazed and radical — like overthrowing the Republic under the guise of protecting it.

Johnson blogs March 27:

Katie Haun, federal prosecutor-turned-crypto VC-and-real estate mogul.

She’s either a federal asset running an extremely sophisticated op—or she’s another Charles McGonigal, the disgraced indicted FBI counterintelligence officer.

…I’ve seen Training Day—one of the most seditious movies ever shot.

And yes, there are lots of ex-federal law enforcement people who freelance by working for multiple intelligence agencies, sometimes even wittingly.

But there’s another far more menacing way corruption takes place: the purchasing of a federal prosecutor while still in office. I’ve seen a lot of that too. And sometimes it’s quite subtle.
Disgraced lobbyist and foreign spy Jack Abramoff said that the fastest way to own a federal official was to say that after his time in government was up that he could come work for him.

I suspect something very similar happened with Haun and Coinbase, where Haun is still a board member despite dumping a lot of her shares on retail.

In her interview with Tim Ferriss she goes on at some length about how Brian Armstrong recruited her to serve on the board.

Haun has emerged as a sort of “respectable face” for crypto. But what if — gasp!— there’s no respectable way to do crypto?

Why she studied with Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents! She went to Stanford. She even clerked for Justice Kennedy, who, as you know, has no problems whatsoever!

…Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong recently bought a $133 million luxury real estate property in Bel Air.

No, this isn’t the crypto future you were promised. This is just good old fashioned money laundering into real estate. Maybe they got the memo that real estate was “safe as houses.”

Yes, I do want to crack down on this “innovation.”

If this analysis is correct — and I suspect it very much is — you should do everything you can to short COIN 0.52%↑ . Yes, I believe Coinbase will go to zero.

Johnson blogs March 26:

I think we really need to investigate the possibility that many of the “innovators” are in fact money launderers — the sons of mobsters — who were well educated at America’s (allegedly) finest schools and who serve foreign powers, especially China, Russia, and Israel. These are big claims but, I fear, the mounting evidence supports them.

…One of the cofounders of PayPal is Yu Pan. You don’t hear too much about Yu Pan though by some accounts — notably Peter Thiel’s in Zero To One — Pan was one of the six key people for starting PayPal.

…It’s gauche to talk about the Chinese guy in the backroom but there’s one at Tesla (Tom Zhu) and at LinkedIn (Eric Ly). In fact there’s a Chinese guy in the backroom at virtually every one of the major tech companies so much so that it’s kind of a cliché.

In some cases there’s even a Chinese in the bedroom: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Jason Calcanis and Jade Li, Sequoia’s Roelof Botha and Huifen Chen. An unwillingness to focus on the Chinese or Asian wives is to understate their influence on some of the most powerful men on the planet. If this isn’t racist or sexist I don’t know what is. Now I’m sure no one’s wife controls them but let’s just say that getting divorced in California is not exactly a pleasant affair. That’s always lurking.

In South Asia it’s common to see an Ali Baba business — Ali is the brown face while Baba is the Chinese guy in the background. I suspect we will learn a bit more about this as the Southeast Asians become the designated middle men as Chimerica breaks up.

Of course you’re not really supposed to ask how many businesses are this way in Silicon Valley and if they might generally be a thing.

A major reason a number of venture funds are “founder friendly” is because its easier to have established channels for moving money into the United States. Genius is, by its very definition, hard to grok. The true geniuses appear almost alien. Think John von Neumann at his best. But genius can be faked. You can have the trappings but not the talent…

Sequoia has to pretend that invested with Sam Bankman-Fried when they know full well they were just moving Chinese money and taking a fee. You’re supposed to pretend too — at least when interest rates are high…

Another way of thinking about it is that much of Silicon Valley is about casting. This is, indeed, why so many of them have been involved in Hollywood.
The actors are white or Jewish faces, preferably from Stanford (though Harvard and MIT will do in a pinch) with Asian money and technology.
But who is the director? And what happens when there isn’t the money to pay for the elaborate play?

…Bill Lee was CEO and co-founder of Remarq. Before its acquisition by Critical Path in March 2000 for $265 million, the company developed high-volume messaging for sites such as eBay, Sun, Novell, and Amazon — an ideal place if ever there were one for listening in on American tech.

…We also see Lee trying to get social proof. Lee married Al Gore’s daughter Sarah Gore in 2007 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Both Lee and Sacks were early SpaceX investors. Lee also backed Yammer, which Sacks founded and ran as CEO.

They also invested in Tosca Musk’s porn oriented venture — PassionFlix — alongside Bill Lee, Dana Guerin, Jason Calacanis, Kimbal Musk, Lyn Lear, Norman Lear and Patrick Cheung. PassionFlix was founded by Tosca Musk.

Sacks co-founded blockchain startup Harbor as an incubation of Craft Ventures in 2017. The idea for Harbor seems to have come from Lee.

Joshua Stein, CEO of Harbor, was preciously the General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Zenefits. Sacks was CEO, COO, and investor of Zenefits.

Bill Lee was, of course, appointed by the Mayor of San Jose to the Redevelopment Committee of San Jose, a known hub for Chinese money laundering into real estate. (Rather interestingly Sacks have been calling for

Lee also invested in AngelList, which was heavily Chinese compromised. AngelList’s Naval Ravikant repaid the favor and called Sacks “the world’s best product strategist.”

Rather hilariously Bill Lee founded “My Doge Inc.”

…Why has David Sacks become such a big backer of right-wing causes all of a sudden? Has he been ordered to? Two other investments may suggest just that — Bird and Rumble.

****

A few years ago I heard a pitch for Locals.com, a kind of “alt tech” play that boasted my erstwhile friend Scott Adams as an investor.

The company was cofounded by David Rubin and Assaf Lev, an Israeli officer who was very difficult to find online.

It became quite clear that the Locals platform was a way by which the Israelis, particularly the Likud faction, could move money outside of the GoFundMe/Patreon modes which were increasingly coming under anti-money laundering review.(GiveSendGo is another one of these types of operations, albeit focused on a more religious group.)

Locals was ultimately acquired by Rumble, a video platform backed by Peter Thiel and now Senator J.D. Vance. You might wonder, as I do, if perhaps this Locals acquisition was a way of paying off a lot of the early investors in Locals — including David Sacks. Sacks’s Craft Ventures continues to buy up Rumble stock.

Weirdly the platform pays Glenn Greenwald, Russell Brand, and a number of conservative influencers. You might wonder — as I do — who Glenn Greenwald really works for.

How the company can be worth $2 billion and counting is anyone’s guess. If we work on revenue comparison and look at independent valuations of Youtube as a standalone company, maybe Rumble is worth $200 million.

Rumble announced that it was moving its US headquarters to Longboat Key, Florida. Rumble was founded in October 2013 by Chris Pavlovski, a Canadian technology entrepreneur.

…More likely we should see Rumble in the same as the rest of the alt-tech ecosystem — dead on arrival. YouTube and Google generally were turned by US intelligence sometime in 2019. Google continues to hire loads of ex-intelligence people.

Johnson blogs March 21:

It is extremely important that mainstream newspapers are starting to understand the role of #GENINT, that is the role genealogy plays in intelligence…

Your behavior, intelligence, personality are all highly heritable. There are families of tailors, smiths, wrights, carpenters, etc. There are also families of spies, like the Maxwells. An unwillingness to notice spy families and their roles in geopolitics has left us unprepared for the modern world which is mostly spy versus spy among the great powers.

You need to know who is related to who and what that means. I’ve long believed that Galton’s book, Hereditary Genius (1869), should be seen as one of the first forays into this sort of research. He essentially made the social graph of his day legible, in much the same that LinkedIn or Facebook does today. Galton knew that many traits skip generations.

Knowing that fact of heredity, it’s going to be become increasingly important as we examine public figures like the PayPal Mafia. Such research affects markets too, especially as markets become more oligarchic.

…David Sacks cofounded a genealogical database company — Geni. Ancestry is owned by the Chinese through Blackstone. Deborah Liu — Ancestry’s current CEO — was an acolyte of Sheryl Sandberg, herself from a spy family who helped move Jews out of the Soviet Union. If you don’t think genealogy is used by other countries you are sorely mistaken. Knowing the bloodlines can help you see the fault lines—and avoid the bloodlands that historian Timothy Snyder points out and warns about in his works.

However counterintuitive it might seem there’s quite a lot of evidence for the historical record confirming that most elites stay in charge. See generally the work of Gregory Clark, whose book The Son Also Rises is perhaps the seminal text here. His analysis of surnames is quite good though that he’s simply updating Galton’s work.

My sense is that a lot of us are already getting quite smart about ancestry in light of the recent frauds we’ve seen. Elizabeth Holmes had a family member also involved in Enron and medical fraud.

We don’t like to think that this is true in America but it is. Intergenerational mobility is something of a myth.

Johnson blogs March 19:

…if Lindell has made millions from Chinese slave labor (while lying and claiming his products are made in America) that money could easily constitute a kind of pass through to Fox News from the Chinese government.

…The New York Times reported that Lindell is far and away the largest individual advertiser on Fox’s prime-time lineup, spending nearly $80 million since January of 2021.

The Dominion lawsuit makes it abundantly clear that Lindell had Fox in a precarious position:

“Indeed, when Lindell made negative comments about Fox on Newsmax, Fox’s executives exchanged worried emails about alienating him and sent him a gift along with a handwritten note from Suzanne Scott,” the court documents said. “Fox had a strong motive to welcome him on air and avoid rebutting his baseless claims.”

I am unaware of any evidence that Mike Lindell’s pillows come from Chinese slave labor. That seems like a reckless claim.

Johnson blogs March 19:

I attended the March 2003 protest in the Boston Common — which was then the largest protest in Boston since the Vietnam War. I was fourteen.

My father was not pleased and advised me not to be involved in political protests. He told me quite rightly that there would be people there who meant me harm.

Johnson blogs March 12:

Regulators are removing Chinese influence from America starting with the things which are most abstract and ridiculous — crypto, start up valuations, vineyards — and move to the things which are most practical — housing.

…Quite a number of Chinese saw what happened to dear Jack Ma and they wanted the money out, out, out. Many of them moved that money into Silicon Valley bank — and that’s when the troubles began.

…Some time ago I was exposed to Silicon Valley Bank and met with them on occasion over the years.

“They’ll bank anyone,” a Silicon Valley friend told me after brokering an introduction. “Anyone?” says I. Do they know I’m a thought criminal?

In raising capital for Traitwell — I personally put in $600K+ — I had a few would be investors tell me that I had to appear as Silicon Valley-esque as possible. I informed them that would be a problem as, in my view, Silicon Valley operated a blacklist.

Johnson blogs March 7: “I think that in a world where black men are routinely killed by police…” Insane! Much of what Johnson blogs is insane. Far more police are killed by blacks than unarmed blacks are killed by police.

Johnson blogs: “My view, for what it’s worth, is that the moon landing was real but the footage was fake.” Insane. This is not something you should have a “view” on. You should evidence or you should shut up.

Johnson continues: “Why did the Germans lose the war? The Nazis had more planes, more engineers, and were, I think it’s fair to say, way smarter, and yet they lost all the same. Why? They were out spied and ultimately out-bullshitted by Anglo-American intelligence.”

Not strong analysis. The Anglo world had far more industrial might than did the Axis powers.

Johnson: “I believe that the only real education is self-education.” Not a strong point. Of course we can and should learn from others.

Johnson: “I’ve found that the Chinese, Russians, and Likud tend to be very nervous around genetics.” Such an impossibly broad statement with many individual refutations. It’s a shame you have to wade through so much nonsense in Johnson’s Substack to get to the gold.

Johnson blogs February 27, 2023: “There are so many things to be said about the Eric Weinstein and Joe Rogan podcast from this past week that it’s hard to know where to go and how hard or hurried to go there. It’s a deeply impressive piece of Likud propaganda…”

I don’t share Johnson’s view on the worldwide power of Israel’s Likud party.

Chuck Johnson frequently operates in the places where the buses don’t run no more. It’s hard to get reliable information about these places.

Johnson: “I have various theories about why Rogan, who is likely compromised, would be so loathe to expose Weinstein.”

Joe Rogan, like Chuck Johnson, often displays bad epistemics.

Johnson: “Weinstein was fired from his job as the managing director of Thiel Capital — something he doesn’t mention or disclose to the audience.”

“I’ve long argued that Weinstein needs to go to jail for the harms he’s causing in our understanding both of scientific principles and geopolitics.”

Dramatic over-statement. Bret and Eric Weinstein are terrible gurus.

Johnson blogs February 27, 2003:

A friend of mine who is himself an influencer explained it thusly: ‘It would be useful to explain to the audience that these people systematically target all new influencers. That if you get successful talking to an audience, you will be beset by obsessive weird spies who may attempt to destroy you if they can’t blackmail you.’

For a time, Jake Novak ran him. So did Israeli-American David Keyes. So did Joel Pollak. And so did Dave Rubin, whose company Locals is backed by Israeli intelligence. Novak got in trouble for trying to set up Congressman Matt Gaetz and was later denounced by the Yair Lapid government.

David Keyes, a close associate of Netanyahu, ran an intelligence operation for Likud managing online social media influencers. “While working for former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky in Israel, Keyes founded CyberDissidents.org, a site meant to ‘highlight the voices of democratic online activists in the Middle East.’” We’ve talked about Sharansky elsewhere, of course, but he’s a front for the Russians in Israel.

Keyes is “a pioneer in online activism” but was recently removed from power thanks to his own “fake because” involving women. (Bret Stephens’s New York Times column on this subject should be seen as the old Mossad vs. Likud fight now playing out across Israel and the world.)

Joel Pollak works for Breitbart.com where the aforementioned Rebekah Mercer is an investor. He had quite a political transformation. I once knew him — I even volunteered on his 2010 campaign for congress — and I scarcely recognize him. Rubin’s company got pumped filled with cash thanks to David Sacks’ investment. My understanding is that Adams was an investor in Locals, which has since merged with Rumble. Once upon a time one of their Israeli investors asked me if I wanted to be pitched the company.

In other words being an influencer is dangerous. You never know who is influencing you. Or why.
This is particularly sad to me because what Scott doesn’t seem to realize is that there are deep intelligence ties between the Sinaloa cartel and the Israelis who ran him. You can even read about those ties in Haaetz, the paper of record in Israel. That’s especially dark given that his stepson died of a drug overdose in 2018.

Johnson blogs February 16, 2023:

You get paid for being right in investing. In journalism? Well, it all depends if some nation state likes your work or not.

What tends to happen is that in going independent you very much become dependent on your various sources of income and given the anonymous nature of a lot of donations on the Internet some of that money can come and does come from foreign intelligence. You can see that with the Chinese money flowing to both the Proud Boys and to #BlackLivesMatter.

When you’re an independent journalist you become a cut out, sometimes totally unwittingly. Sometimes it really is as simple as who your mentors are.

…Russia has the manpower but not the will while Ukraine has the will but not the manpower.

Johnson blogs February 16: “There’s no intelligence community worth its salt that doesn’t take genealogy very seriously.”

Johnson blogs February 14: “My friend J.D. Vance, now Senator Vance, can inveigh about how East Palestine is being ignored.”

I don’t believe Johnson is inventing things out of whole cloth when he claims to know J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, Matt Gaetz, etc.

Johnson blogs February 13, 2023:

Every soldier takes an IQ test. I took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) in high school. I scored a 99 percentile and was selected for “military intelligence.” Conversations with my grandfather dissuaded me from enlisting. He recommended that I do ROTC if I was interested in military service. (Later he even discouraged me against ROTC, telling me that we need good men and women in the intelligence services. “The wars of the future will be fought with satellites—and brains,” he said. He opposed Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.)

…When you deliberately hire the dumbest applicants to be cops you get exactly what you’d expect—just another criminal gang. The cops in Memphis were as much victims of that stuff as Tyre Nichols and they were “trained” by hostile foreign intelligence.

…You can have all the technology in the world but if you have dumb criminal cops you’re going to get dumb criminal behavior.

…When understood in this context it’s not at all surprising that Memphis has over a 140 unsolved murders. The anti-gang cop gang is looking for altercations to fulfill the worst predilections, not seeking to solve murders.

Johnson blogs Feb. 12:

Why can’t we see football for what it is — a waste of our youngest, fittest men in what amounts to a gladiatorial blood sport?

And that’s before we even discuss how the game — when played at its highest levels — is totally rigged by mobsters, their descendants, and their front men?

Are we sacrificing our young people for a game that’s totally rigged? How many other things are totally rigged?

He doesn’t provide any new evidence for football games being rigged. I suspect that some NFL games have not been 100% on the level, but I don’t see any evidence that the league is “totally rigged.” That strikes me as a reckless claim. What people do in one thing — such as make reckless claims — they usually do in many things. Johnson is reckless. Sometimes he’s uniquely right, but more often, he’s just plain reckless.

Feb. 8, Johnson blogs: “We might consider treating some of these purveyors of misinformation or promoters of intellectual cul de sacs in much the same way as we treated their fascist antecedents — by identifying them, by confronting them, and ultimately by jailing them.”

Wanting to jail people for purveying misinformation and promoting intellectual cul de sacs is insane.

Johnson: “Notice how Eric [Weinstein] is controlling Joe Rogan?”

There are many strong arguments against investing time in listening to Eric Weinstein and Joe Rogan, but whether or not Eric is controlling Joe is not worth thinking about. It’s like arguing about which porn director is controlling another porn director.

Johnson writes about Joe Biden’s State of the Union address:

Here is a deeply empathetic president who was in command…

For now let us lay out the arguments against him. They tell us he doesn’t speak right. That he’s old. That he’s infirm. That he’s senile. That he can’t get it done. That he’s in decline.

Well tonight those critiques all melted away…

But for now our government is in safe hands and that’s all that really matters…

President Joe Biden is the man for this moment. Long may the moment last and may he.

Chuck Johnson strikes me as an enthusiast. He’s always enthusiastic about something, and right now that’s Joe Biden.

Johnson writes Jan. 31, 2023:

We recently discussed how Joe Rogan might be getting blackmailed and elsewhere I’ve called for Joe Rogan to be taken down. I believe I’m the first Rogan guest to call for that unfortunately necessary extreme step.

I see Rogan as a kind of Alex Jones light figure and I support the deep state efforts to take down Alex Jones who I regard as a kind of front for Likud interests.

…a lot of wars of words where people call one another “racist,” “Islamophobe,” etc. are really cover for inter-intelligence agency fights or even hostile enemy intel actions. The same goes for allegations of sexual misconduct.

There are strong arguments against investing time in listening to Alex Jones and Joe Rogan, but that Joe is blackmailed and Alex is controlled by Likud interests are not the best of those arguments.

Also, most wars of words have nothing to do with inter-intelligence agency fights.

Jan. 30, 2023, Johnson writes:

Stern once made “an observation in private” about Joe. What kind of “observation” in private could possibly blow up the relationship between the largest radio host of all time and the largest podcaster of all time, especially when considering what was said and done on air between them? Well, you can hear in the previously linked video that one of Joe’s co-hosts let it slip: “he said you were gay.”

…An almost identical episode took place between Joe Rogan and John Mcafee, another earlier guest on the JRE. Joe would break ties with Mcafee, again claiming it was something he said on the podcast, but John makes it clear that it was in fact something he said to Joe in private, something about a “part of Joe’s life” he has no right to make public, something involving gay orgies, apparently. Ok.

…But things took a much weirder and darker turn when Cenk Uyghur and Ana Kasparian openly said Joe was a “groomer” and “pedophile.” They really should be quoted here:

“Look, I don’t know how many children Joe Rogan might have molested,” Uygur said. “I don’t know why he’s covering it up so much. But people have a right to know — how much of a groomer and pedophile is Joe Rogan?”

“If you’re the trans person or several people that slept with Joe Rogan, can you let us know? Because it’s obvious that it’s personal for him. Hey Joe, you slept with a person like that — there’s nothing wrong with it, get over it. Get over it. Get over it, Joe!” Uygur yelled. “It’s super obvious that you’re super into trans people, and you’re taking it out — the hatred of yourself on them and you’re making their life dangerous!” Uygur concluded.

Many strange things about this discussion. Firstly, both Cenk and Ana have been close to Rogan for years, and both appeared on the JRE (though they have also appeared on RT, without going into too much detail about who’s behind the TYT network or the Justice Democrats). But, secondly, after the accusations were made, it was, of all people, Glenn Greenwald that confronted them about this claim of Rogan being gay.

…A very strange clip of Eric Weinstein talking to fellow Likud agent Lex Fridman aka Alexei Fedotov about Joe Rogan and how he’s grateful for what he did for Sam Harris, his brother Bret, and for Alexei himself, but that he’s “worried about him.”

Jan. 26, 2023, Johnson writes:

The Chinese may even have captured the Supreme Court through the very Chisraeli Federalist Society. They’ve certainly captured the man who was formerly the richest in the world. Musk has, however, outlived his usefulness and the DOJ and American security state is nipping at his heels while the market wants the model T of electric vehicles…

But who shall replace Musk as the principal agent of China within the United States? I submit to you that person is Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI.

Jan. 23, 2023, Johnson writes:

How America’s Jewish oligarchs helped Netanyahu end accountability and democracy in Israel…

Among the more fascinating things in contemporary politics is how much of our sense making about the Middle East has first gone through a Likud-financed filter.

…When “King Bibi” falls there must be a reckoning for all the Americans who supported his criminal government and its operations on January 6th, Brazil, and around the world.

Collective punishment is always wrong. That’s why I’ve long opposed both the treatment of the Palestinians and the Israeli boycotts. But the solution isn’t to boycott Israel but to boycott Bibi — and his willing American accomplices. Yes, it’s time to actively put pressure on Bibi’s American supporters. We need to know if the Lauder family still supports Netanyahu’s illegal assault on the Israeli courts.

…We must also begin the process of ridding the American discourse of Likud-compromised publications.

These firms include The Wall Street Journal, especially its editorial page, and Newsweek’s Josh Hammer. Hammer recently got engaged to an Israeli woman. There’s a long history of Americans, especially those in the media, being “assigned” Israeli wives. Is it love? Is it espionage? Is it both? Hard to say and hard to say by design.

Did you know that Ben Shapiro married an Israeli? Or that one of the producers of Tucker Carlson’s show married a woman who worked in the Israeli embassy?

…I don’t think people understand that the Jews in America that fund Bibi don’t have to deal with any of the consequences the people in the streets are dealing with right now – what he is trying to do to the courts is a Federalist Society project and Yoram Hazony is the link to it. Yes, Bibi is the most dangerous man in the world in this goy’s humble opinion, made all the more dangerous by his willingness to use the technology of a police state to effectuate his ends.

…In the end this isn’t really about Israel at all but about a global effort to subvert independent fact checking authorities. It’s an attack on the sense-making apparatus which sustains civic life. It’s fashionable to call this an assault on “democracy,” but it’s really an attack on noticing and documenting.

Johnson wants to jail people who promote disinformation. Perhaps he sometimes feels so out of control, he wants to jail parts of him himself.

Bibi is the most dangerous man in the world? That seems a stretch.

Who are the independent fact checking authorities we should be protecting?

Jan. 20, 2023 Johnson writes:

I think we need to just stop pretending these are real businesses. It’s embarrassing. These are foreign-funded fronts, powered by foreign cash and the good will (and hard earned money) of true believers.
We’ve already delved into how many conservative influencers are in fact foreign agents of hostile powers and we’ve pointed out how those social media platforms have longstanding ties to foreign intelligence themselves.
…We’re now entering the part of the conversation where government action is needed to crack down on what are essentially foreign-funded intelligence operations in the United States.
…Maybe Crowder is in on Big Con all along.

Johnson may be on to some things here. Offering Steven Crowder $50 million for four years is not primarily a for-profit business deal. There’s something else going on here.

Jan. 19, 2023, Johnson writes: “This is why I suspect that federal informant Hunter Biden will ultimately become a hero or perhaps president.”

Count me skeptical.

Johnson believes that we live under Israeli occupation. He writes Jan. 23, 2023: “If you’re under an occupation maybe the most patriotic thing you can do is steal an election. What an interesting paradox! Why should we fetishize elections anyway? Wasn’t Hitler democratically elected?”

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Connor Roy Needs Love Too (4-11-23)

Posted on April 11, 2023 by Luke Ford

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