The Chuck Johnson Story

According to Wikipedia (retrieved April 28, 2023):

Charles Carlisle Johnson (born October 22, 1988) is an American alt-right political activist who was a public figure in the years 2013 to 2019. A self-described “investigative journalist”, Johnson is often described as an internet troll and has been repeatedly involved in the proliferation and spread of multiple fake news stories. Johnson was owner of the websites GotNews.com, WeSearchr.com, and Freestartr.com, all of which were short-lived. He wrote two books, both published by Encounter Books in 2013.

Johnson attended Milton Academy high school on scholarship. He attended Claremont McKenna College from 2007 to 2011. At college he was awarded the Eric Breindel Collegiate Journalism Award and the Publius Fellowship at the Claremont Institute. In 2016, Johnson wrote a memo encouraging Claremont Institute alumni to help elect Donald Trump as president.

Johnson has a long-standing relationship with Silicon Valley financier and Trump backer Peter Thiel,[11] including collaboration on strategy against Gawker & work for the Trump campaign, as outlined in detail in the book The Contrarian.

Johnson was involved in the creation of a Daily Caller story that accused U.S. Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) of soliciting underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. A criminal investigation of the case found no evidence, and the women making the allegations later admitted they had been paid by a local lawyer to make the claims.

On October 14, 2013, Johnson published an article in The Daily Caller claiming that Newark mayor and then senatorial candidate Cory Booker never lived in Newark. The article cited neighbors of Booker’s alleged address as evidence. Booker’s campaign provided a reporter from BuzzFeed with rental checks and other documents for the address going back several years, and Booker’s communication director dismissed Johnson’s allegations as “laughable”. According to Booker’s campaign, he lived there from late 2006 to shortly before he was elected Senator in 2013. Johnson stood by his reporting, claiming that Booker may well have paid rent but did not live in Newark.

In January 2014, Johnson published an article reporting that The New York Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick was arrested for exhibitionism and had previously posed for Playgirl. Johnson’s source for the Playgirl claim was a January 22, 1990, article in The Daily Princetonian, which was later revealed to be satirical. Johnson apologized to Kirkpatrick.

Johnson told the ABC news affiliate in Fresno that he knew where Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was. The airplane disappeared on March 8, 2014, while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. “I just need the funding to go there,” he told news reporters.

On June 30, 2014, Johnson published a story on GotNews accusing Mississippi senator Thad Cochran of bribing African-Americans to vote for him in the Mississippi Senate Republican primary. The story came days after Cochran had defeated Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel in a run-off election. Johnson claimed that a black pastor named Stevie Fielder had told him he was paid by Cochran’s campaign to bribe black Democrats into voting for Cochran. Johnson paid the pastor for his statements, a controversial practice sometimes known as “checkbook journalism”. Fielder later partially recanted his story, saying that he had been speaking hypothetically, that he had turned down the offer, and that Johnson’s recording of his interview had been selectively edited, a claim Johnson denies.

During the election, Johnson also accused the Cochran campaign of being responsible for Mississippi Tea Party leader Mark Mayfield’s suicide and encouraged his Twitter followers to flood a Cochran campaign conference call.

During the Ferguson unrest, Johnson published the Instagram account of shooting victim Michael Brown and stated that the account “shows a violent streak that may help explain what led to a violent confrontation with Police officer Darren Wilson”. Johnson also filed a lawsuit to have Brown’s juvenile records released. In Brown’s home state of Missouri, the records of minors are private, but Johnson argued that the matter was of pressing public interest under the state’s sunshine law. The county court disagreed. Further appeal attempts by Johnson to unseal the records went as far as the State Supreme Court of Missouri, which denied his request.

In a separate incident during the unrest, Johnson published the addresses of two The New York Times reporters, claiming that they published the known addresses of Darren Wilson. The New York Times has said the reporters only revealed the street on which Wilson once lived.

In December 2014, Rolling Stone columnist Sabrina Erdely published an article entitled “A Rape on Campus” about the alleged gang rape of a University of Virginia (UVA) student named “Jackie” in 2012 at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at UVA. The article was later found to be fabricated. Johnson publicly identified Jackie, but in the selection of photos he used had the wrong photo of Jackie.

On May 24, 2015, Johnson sent a tweet asking his followers for donations to help him “take out” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson. McKesson shared the tweet and took the tweet as a threat. Johnson was permanently banned from Twitter after several users reported him for harassment. In 2018, Johnson sued Twitter for banning him on the grounds that Twitter violated his First Amendment right to free speech. The California Superior Court in Fresno struck down Johnson’s lawsuit on June 6. In 2022, Johnson reportedly received assurance from Elon Musk associate Jared Birchall that he may be unbanned following the purchase of Twitter by Musk.

In February 2017, Johnson’s website GotNews.com claimed that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh was “the source behind a bunch of leaks” in the White House without offering any concrete evidence.

In August 2017, Johnson’s website GotNews was one of several right-wing websites that falsely accused a Michigan man of being responsible for the car attack on August 12, 2017, that killed and injured anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Michigan man was subsequently harassed, and was advised by police to flee his home following a slew of death threats. Together with his father, the Michigan man filed a defamation lawsuit against 22 corporate and individual defendants, including Johnson. On June 1, 2018, Johnson and GotNews agreed to pay a total of $29,900 to settle the lawsuit.

In September 2016, Johnson published a story on GotNews about a soon-to-launch anti-Trump website called PutinTrump.org.[36] WikiLeaks forwarded the story in private to Donald Trump Jr. before publicly tweeting it. Business Insider speculated that Johnson’s story in September on GotNews may have marked the beginning of Donald Trump Jr.’s—and the Trump campaign’s—back-channel contact with Julian Assange and Wikileaks. (Johnson wrote after Wikileaks tweeted the story, “About 2 hours after our original article, Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks repeated our discoveries. Guess which big leaks organization reads GotNews & WeSearchr on the downlow! Come on Julian, let’s work together. WikiLeaks & WeSearchr is a match made in heaven. We can take down Hillary together.”)[37] In August 2017, Johnson brokered and attended a meeting in London between GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Julian Assange to discuss a presidential pardon for Assange.

On December 11, 2017, Johnson wrote on his Facebook page, “Michael Cernovich & I are going to end the career of a U.S. Senator.” Johnson claimed to have uncovered a sexual harassment lawsuit against Senator Charles Schumer. The lawsuit, however, turned out to be a forgery. Moreover, language in the forged lawsuit was copied verbatim from a real sexual-harassment complaint filed against Rep. John Conyers. Schumer referred the matter to Capitol police for investigation.

In 2017, Johnson posted on a Reddit Ask Me Anything “I do not and never have believed the six million figure” (referring to the number of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust) and “I agree with [Holocaust denier] David Cole about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.”[41] When Rep. Matthew Gaetz brought Johnson to President Donald Trump’s 2018 State of the Union Address as a guest of Florida, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League cited these statements—along with Johnson’s website WeSearchr having raised more than $150,000 for the legal defense of neo-Nazi propagandist Andrew Anglin and other actions—in urging Gaetz to “discontinue any association with Johnson and to publicly repudiate his views immediately”.

Johnson has written two books published through Encounter Books:[44] Why Coolidge Matters, an essay collection encompassing various points in Calvin Coolidge’s political career[45] and featuring blurbs from John Yoo, Michelle Malkin, and Ted Cruz, & The Truth About the IRS Scandals. Both books were published in 2013.

In June 2015, Johnson sued Gawker for defamation in Missouri for $66 million for Gawker’s publication of rumours that Johnson defecated on the floor while a student at Claremont McKenna College, and filed a similar suit in California in December. In January 2016, the Missouri suit was dismissed. Johnson settled with Gawker’s estate in 2018.

On October 18, 2021, more than two years after the death of Jeffrey Epstein, Johnson decided to discuss his Breitbart boss and mentor Steve Bannon’s relationship with the pedophile and human trafficker in an interview with Rolling Stone reporter Seth Hettena. Steve Bannon met with Epstein multiple times after exiting the White House, including in December 2017. This was while Johnson was being managed by Bannon at Breitbart. Johnson told Rolling Stone that Bannon viewed Epstein as both a rival and spy, and was deeply interested in emulating Jeffrey Epstein’s operation. Bannon also offered to introduce Johnson to Epstein, and Johnson claims he declined but continued to work under Bannon at Breitbart. In addition, Johnson declared in the Rolling Stone piece that he quietly shifted his allegiance from Donald Trump to Joe Biden, likely after the presidential election or sometime in early 2021.

Johnson was the founder of three websites, all of which are defunct.

In early 2014, Johnson created GotNews, an alt-right news website.[7] The site went offline with no advance warning on September 17, 2018.[52] GotNews filed for bankruptcy in May 2019. The bankruptcy petition lists GotNews’ total liabilities as between $500,000 and $1 million.[53]

In 2015, Johnson created WeSearchr, a crowd-funding website. By 2017, the site became a fundraising platform for alt-right causes, though Johnson claimed that was not his intention. Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, founder of The Daily Stormer, used the website to raise money to defend himself against a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of a woman trolled by followers of Anglin. In addition to crowdfunding legal battles, the site was also designed to crowd-fund bounties on reporting goals. According to Johnson, he used the site to receive money for information he had already acquired. The site closed in May 2017.

Johnson also started the crowdfunding site Freestartr, which collected funds for white nationalist Richard B. Spencer, far-right activist Tommy Robinson, Canadian nationalist Faith Goldy, Johnson himself, and others. In mid-2018, Freestartr stopped accepting funds, as the site was banned by Stripe and PayPal, which Freestartr used to process payments.

Johnson was also revealed as a “secret” cofounder of Clearview AI in a 2021 New York Times Magazine article.

April 14, 2023, I compiled this post about Chuck Johnson:

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?”

On his Twitter Space April 26, 2023, Chuck Johnson says: “I first got married at 24. I was traditionally minded. I thought if I got married, it would solve the loneliness I felt when I moved across the country. I was not close to my parents who were not supportive of me going to college. My mother had cancer throughout my childhood. My wife was 27. It didn’t work out. It was similar to Steven [Crowder]. The wife said I don’t want to be married anymore. My ex-wife hasn’t remarried. She hasn’t dated. We’re going on five years since [the divorce]. With Crowder, it seems clear to me that he is gay. There’s something effeminate about dressing up every day. The Republican party influencer side is half gay, half operatives of foreign countries. Ben Shapiro is clearly in the foreign operative category. There’s something performative and gay adjacent about politics. The British take a lot of their gay men and put them into the foreign service.”

“I first encountered Steven when he was working for this student-loan billionaire Cary Katz. He was a big backer of Mark Levin and other characters. Steven presented the image that he was independent. He has Mug Club. I wondered how these things work in practice. How do people make money in these businesses? And you realize that they don’t. They get billionaire sugar daddies who finance everything but they don’t want you to know. They pretend they are real businesses.

“Tucker Carlson has this thing that David Brooks calls status-income disequilibrium. Tucker is on TV and all the billionaires wish that they were on TV. So he’ll go to all the events [with rich people] and he’ll give speeches at $50,000 a speech. Tucker was under an advertiser boycott. [Advertisers] would have women and gay men running their shop. He would get high ratings but he couldn’t convert it into real money.

“If you are thinking about things for Rupert Murdoch, you have to offer something after the January 6 debacle and we saw the Ray Epps 60 Minutes fiasco. The man pushing the Ray Epps story is Darren Beattie who is close to George O’Neal who is connected to the Russians and Katherine O’Neal who worked for the State Department. Revolver News has a billionaire sugar daddy with all the Russians. Darren Beattie had a kid with a Russian woman. Darren and I were friends during the Trump years. We were the only two people on the Claremont ListServ who predicted that Donald Trump would win the nomination. He was fired from Duke for backing Donald Trump. I helped him get a job as a speech writer for Donald J. Trump. Then it was discovered that he had given a speech [at the H.L. Mencken Club]. He was let out of the building because Israeli types, ADL types… He was on his own. I recommended to Matt Gaetz that he hire him. He hired him. And then he went right into the arms of the Russians. You’ll see this theme of resentment a lot in the people around Tucker. Tucker has resentments that he doesn’t lead the country. A lot of Gen Xers and Millenials are just observing life. They’re detached. They’re talking about the elites and the media from the sidelines because they’re not allowed to participate.”

“Tucker is the failed son of an august family. He went to the right schools. His mother abandoned him. He and his brother weren’t there when she died. She was trying to patch things up and they were against her. I’ve seen Tucker say a lot of rough things about women. He’s duplicitous. He would tell me one thing and then betray me. He was very close to Jamie Weinstein. When I was with the Daily Caller, I broke a number of stories about Cory Booker not living in Newark but in New York. The Israelis were trying to extort Cory Booker over his homosexuality. Rosie Gray, a Likud-heavy reporter chick, came after me on that story. She then went to Tucker to pressure Tucker to fire me. I was an independent contractor so I went in a different direction. A lot of Buzzfeed’s investors were Cory Booker’s donors.”

“A lot of these people came up in a low-interest rate environment from 2008 to 2021. Tucker was the controlled anti-neocon. He did a [January 28, 2016] story for Politico defending Trump. This presented the story that he was the Trump whisperer. He could talk to those voters. When I was talking to Roger Ailes, the thinking was that Tucker could reach a younger demographic. He was hip. He had been on Dancing with the Stars. Tucker and I would have all kinds of conversations about Likud, Israel, and how crazy some of these Jews were. About Ben Smith. He was not a fan, nor was I. He disliked a lot of the same people I disliked, but not necessarily for the same reasons. I was mistaken.”

“In 2017, the CIA asked me to go see Julian Assange. I had access to Assange through Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. Dana was friendly with the Russians, possibly homosexual. He came up through a gay network in DC. He and I would go see Assange. Assange would tell me that his source was the Israelis, not the Russians. I reported that to the FBI, the CIA. When I got back to the USA, my phone was hacked and I got calls from Michael Isikoff and other pro-Israeli reporters, people who wanted us not to focus on the Israeli involvement in 2016 and talk about the Russians. Because of that experience, I was brought into the Mueller Report in the redacted part. James Wolfe from the Senate Intelligence Committee was fucking this woman, Aly Watkins, who was at Buzzfeed. He was leaking more than seminal fluids to her. He lied to the FBI. He got fired. I made it clear I wouldn’t testify. His boss, Richard Burr, was backed by the Israeli wing of the GOP particularly Paul Singer, and I understand now that Paul Singer personally instructed him to come after me due to the Julian Assange stuff.”

“I was dealing with a woman who didn’t want to be my wife anymore who was telling me I didn’t do anything social. I said, I’ll show her. New life, new me. Extremely bad idea. So I signed up to go to all these political events. I’m a low-key dude. I work on my computer. When I throw dinner parties, I have at most five people. I’m not typically social. I decided that I’d show her. Anytime someone invites me to something, I’m going. I agree to go to the State of the Union when Congressman Matt Gaetz invited me [in January of 2018]. Who noticed me being there? The Daily Beast. Buzzfeed.
“Back in those days, I was considered Peter Thiel’s guy. We had worked together on the 2016 election and on bankrupting Gawker. The frame of the world was that I must have been some billionaire’s bitch rather than having aligned interests with that billionaire, which is what happened. I was always skeptical of Peter’s closeness with the Netanyahu crowd and with Israelis generally. He’s an ok guy. He’s weird. Autisty. We’re not cut from the same cloth, but when a billionaire calls you and you are in your mid to late 20s, it’s flattering, particularly when he does what you tell him to do. Matt Gaetz gets all this pressure by the Israeli world. ADL is like Charles Johnson is a Holocaust denier. A lot of my British friends, a lot of my FBI friends, were like, hey, would you mind going to a lot of these super controversial meetings? I said no problem at all. I’m Charles Johnson wherever I go. I can hang out with black nationalists one day and white nationalists another day. Like Louis Theroux. I’m going to all these things because my wife doesn’t want me in the house and I’m super depressed.”

“Ron DeSantis is going to run for governor of Florida. He wants Peter Thiel’s money. Ron DeSantis tells Matt Gaetz, will you give Chuck Johnson a ticket to the State of the Union? I, being a nerd, and a loser, go, that’s awesome. I was excited. Of course, I get targeted by the Israelis. Jake Tapper is there on TV. Jake Tapper has all these Mossad connections. Jake Tapper is going after Matt Gaetz pretty rough.”

“My wife is like, I don’t want to be married. I’m drinking heavily. I’m borrowing a friend’s sports car and I’m thinking to myself, I’m being attacked as a Holocaust denier when I’ve been doing what the U.S. government asked me to do. My businesses are in trouble. Maybe I should just drink a bunch and there’s a curve by my house… Maybe I should just not take it. Maybe this world isn’t for me? I get a call from Matt Gaetz. Matt Gaetz is getting attacked. He’s like WTF is going on? I say, Matt, if you denounce me, neither me nor any of my friends will help you again.”

“I get a text message from Tucker Carlson condemning me. How could you say all these things? I said, I was trying to get the subreddit shut down for the Alt Right because Steve Bannon asked me to and I was trying to clean up all these far right things.”

“Matt Gaetz was defending me on CNN. Tucker was talking to Matt Gaetz. Tucker was like, you should have condemned him. Tucker at the same time is texting me all these supportive things. He’s trying to learn about the Assange visit and what I’d been up to since I was working for him. He’s being duplicitous. He’s living this double life. He’s putting himself at the center of all this information.”

“I’m like, I have to be loyal to Matt Gaetz. It’s held up over the years.”

“All of these people on the Right who are famous have cucked to the Israel Lobby even though that government has basically made it illegal to practice Christianity there.”

“I notice that Tucker is asking me all these questions about what is going on with Israel, what is going on with Paul Singer. If you watch his segment on Paul Singer, you’ll see where I texted Tucker that I’m afraid of Paul Singer, who was behind the Fusion-GPS dossier. This guy is serious. He plays to win. He reads my text on air and makes it like he’s a tough guy taking on Paul Singer. And then of course all sorts of terrible things start happening in Tucker’s personal life. Paul Singer is a proxy for the Mossad. Paul Singer is the one who called up Mitt Romney and told him his running mate was going to be Paul Ryan.”

“The Republican party, until it sheds itself of the Netanyahu problem and the Fox problem, is going to be a cult.”

“I realized in 2016 that I was the only person in the country who had a list of people to go serve in the Trump government. I was 27. Trump had to go to Rebecca Mercer, she gave some money. Peter Thiel. I told Peter to do that.”

“Summertime 2016, Steve Bannon does not know Donald Trump. He asks me to introduce him to Donald Trump, who I knew socially because of my work at the Daily Caller. Whenever Trump would link to one of my articles, I would make a ton of money because I was getting paid a penny click. If you are paid truly on the traffic, you try to cozy up to Drudge and famous people on Twitter. I’m buying Bitcoin.”

“When I paid to fly the women to the second debate, the big woman I was backing was Kathy Shelton. When she was a little girl, she was raped, and Hillary Clinton defended her rapist and laughed about it. I paid to get her new teeth. I got her a new dress. I gave her some money. I paid to bring her to the second debate. I then suggested to Sean Hannity who in turn talked to Steve Bannon, who didn’t want to bring the women to the second debate. Kellyanne Conway didn’t want to do it. Ivanka Trump didn’t want to do it. I said, I’m going to bring them anyway. Hannity secured some planes from Sheldon Adelson, Mr. Likud himself.”

“Roger Ailes falls down and dies in the summer of 2016. I was his token millennial. I had two fellowships at the WSJ. One day I’m at Fox, and Greg Gutfeld comes in to Michael Clemente’s office. I’m an insomniac. I watched Red Eye in college. They want to offer me a job to work at FoxNews.com. Greg is married to a Russian woman. Greg said, the best thing about Fox News is like they got rid of all the jocks from high school and there are just attractive women, class clowns, and nerds everywhere. I remember thinking this is not consistent with my values. These people creep me out. They’re a bunch of New Yorkers. I assumed New York is a degenerate place. I wanted to go back to California and be warm.”

“Politico is an Israeli operation, especially now that it is owned by Axel Springer, which is obsessively pro Israel.”

“Alan Dershowitz told me that Jared Kushner is the dumbest Jew he knew.”

“I start smuggling various people into the federal government through Jared and Peter Thiel. I figured Jared is so dumb, he’s only going to care about Israel and he’s not going to catch the people I put into the Department of Commerce. I thought — I have operational control over various parts of the government. There were all these problems with the relationship Jared was building with Ben Shapiro, Mark Zuckerberg. You wanted President Trump and you got President Kushner. I had my phone hacked. I had all this crazy Israeli shit happening to me. People following me.”

“The Ted Cruz tapes exist with Tucker Carlson and Jack Smith, the special counsel, wants those tapes. Ted Cruz has all these weird connections with the Chinese and the Ukrainian mob. He fucked anything that moved when he lived in DC. His wife is a nutter. His daughter is a nutter. That’s why he is not running for president again.”

NYT: Fox Gambled With Its Future. Tucker Carlson Can Still Take Down the House. (4-28-23)

Richard Spencer v Tucker Carlson (4-27-23)

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Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth 1

Peter Ackroyd writes in this 2015 book:

* There was in any case no sense of privacy in the sixteenth-century world; men commonly shared beds, and princes dined in public. The individuals of every community were under endless scrutiny from their neighbours, and were subject to ridicule or even punishment if they breached generally accepted standards. There was no notion of liberty. If it was asked, ‘May I not do as I wish with what belongs to me?’, the answer came that no man may do what is wrong. In every schoolroom, and from every pulpit, the virtue of obedience was emphasized. It was God’s law, against which there could be no appeal.
The clergy were asked to supervise their parishioners, and the local justices were supposed to watch the bishops to see if they ‘do truly, sincerely, and without all manner of cloak, colour or dissimulation execute and accomplish our will and commandment’. ‘Taletellers’ and ‘counterfeiters of news’ were to be apprehended. The Act of Succession was nailed to the door of every parish church in the country, and the clergy were ordered to preach against the pretensions of the pope; they were forbidden to speak of disputed matters such as purgatory and the veneration of the saints. The royal supremacy was to be proclaimed from every pulpit in the land. Henry demanded no more and no less than total obedience by methods which no king before him had presumed to use. He made it clear that, in obeying their sovereign, the people were in effect obeying God. In the same period the king and Cromwell were reforming local government by placing their trusted men in the provincial councils. In Ireland and Wales and northern England, the old guard was replaced by new and supposedly more loyal men. The country was given order by a strong central authority supervised by Thomas Cromwell, who sent out a series of circular letters to sheriffs and bishops and judges.
The oath attendant upon the Act of Succession was rapidly imposed. The whole of London swore. In Yorkshire the people were ‘most willing to take the oath’. The sheriff of Norwich reported that ‘never were people more willing or diligent’. In the small village of Little Waldingfield in Suffolk, ninety-eight signed with their name, and thirty-five with a mark.

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David Samuels Interview RFK Jr

David Samuels has terrible epistemics. He has no idea what is true. He provides no evidence for his assertions.

He writes for Tabletmag:

* In 2005, Kennedy wrote a blockbuster Rolling Stone magazine article titled “Deadly Immunity,” which presented compelling evidence of an ongoing vaccine safety cover-up led by U.S. national health bureaucrats, including transcripts of a 2000 CDC conference in Norcross, Georgia, where researchers presented information linking the mercury compound thimerosol with neurological problems in children. At its root, the case Kennedy made in his article was no more or less plausible and empirically grounded than the cases that he and dozens of other environmental advocates had been making for decades against large chemical companies for spewing toxins into America’s air, water, and soil, and then lying about it.

Yet the resulting journalistic-bureaucratic firestorm proved that vaccines were different. It also offered a preview of the COVID wars, with pressure campaigns by vaccine believers attacking five fact-checking errors in the article—a number that was hardly unusual for a long and complex reported article in a venue like Rolling Stone. The campaigns led to various emendations of the article by its online publisher, Salon, which eventually retracted the article in 2011. In that year, Kennedy founded the World Mercury Project, which would be renamed the Children’s Health Defense, to keep pressing his assertions about empirical links between vaccinations and the explosion of neurological issues in children.

* It doesn’t take an alarmist to recognize how fast and far the term “conspiracy theory” has morphed from the way it was generally used even a decade ago. Once a description of a particular kind of recognizably insulated and cyclical counterlogic, “conspiracy theory” has become a flashing red light that is used to identify and suppress truths that powerful people find inconvenient. Whereas yesterday’s conspiracy theories involved feverish ruminations on secret cells of Freemasons, Catholics or Jews who communicated with their elders in Rome or Jerusalem through secret tunnel networks or codes, today’s conspiracy theories include whatever evidence-based realities threaten America’s flourishing networks of administrative state bureaucrats, credentialed propagandists, oligarchs, and spies.

Whenever a hole appears in the ozone layer of received opinion, it is sure to be quickly labeled a “conspiracy theory” by a large technology platform. The lab leak in Wuhan was a conspiracy theory, as was the idea that the U.S. government was funding gain-of-function research; the idea that the development of mRNA vaccines was part of a Pentagon biowarfare effort from which Bill Gates boasted of making billions of dollars; the idea that masking schoolchildren had zero effect on the transmission of COVID; the idea that the FBI and the White House were directly censoring Twitter, Google, and Facebook; the idea that the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop showing that he received multi-million-dollar payoffs from agents of foreign powers including China and Russia was real. The most offensive thing about these falsehoods is not the fact that they later turned out to be supported by evidence, which can happen to even the most unlikely seeming hypothesis. Rather, it is that the people who labeled them “false” often knew full well from the beginning that they were true, and were seeking to avoid the consequences; that is how a truth becomes a “conspiracy theory.”

At this point, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy is the country’s leading “conspiracy theorist” alone qualifies him to be president.

* He believes that conspiracy theories are not only real but define American reality. He grew up believing that the CIA most likely assassinated his uncle Jack, and lately, he has come to believe that it also assassinated his father.

* So the idea that large pharmaceutical companies might be using additives or using processes that could cause damage to children didn’t come as a shock to you.

* I saw a number the other day, it said that 45% of American children now suffer from a chronic disease.

* If you were saying, “My name is Bobby Kennedy, and I’m representing an organization called Riverkeeper, and we are taking on Monsanto, which is a big company that is dumping chemicals associated with birth defects into your water,” people look at you and say, “Good for you, Bobby.” So why do you think emotionally, psychologically, that once you took on this other set of big companies, pharmaceutical companies, which work with a different set of chemicals, and started accusing them of some similar practices, suddenly that made you into a dangerous weirdo?

* The opioid crisis kills 56,000 young Americans every year, and they knew it.

* An “anti-vaxxer” is a very bad thing to be, in any kind of polite society. Of course, the alternative is to accept that it’s absolutely normal for there to suddenly be 27 mandatory vaccines in the state of New York, half of which no one ever contemplated 10 years ago. Also, you must believe that every one of those vaccines is immaculate and perfect, because the companies making them would never, ever lie to us—and if you don’t believe that then you are also against vaccinations for polio. Which is absurd.

* Pro-vaccine means you are part of the group. If you are not, then you are no longer part of the group.

* My entire life as a reporter, I never interviewed anybody over the phone for exactly this reason. Ninety percent of the information that you’re going to get about somebody’s going to come from their face, from the way they move their body. That’s how humans communicate.

* I want to keep going for a little while about the pharmaceutical complex itself and the responses to COVID. It’s clear that there was a large-scale Pentagon bio-weapons program. Bill Gates was brought in as a partner for the investment in that program. Research for that program was offshored to labs in China. It seems obvious now that the virus likely escaped from one of those Chinese labs. And that there was funding for exactly this kind of research from the U.S. government at that specific Chinese lab that the virus escaped from. So why isn’t there an effort to create some kind of chain of legal responsibility for the enormous amount of damage that was done, the same way you would do if Monsanto was dumping toxins in the water?

* It’s easy to forget how critical the independent institutional press was to 20th-century American democracy, and how different that press was from the state-run bullshit farms we have now. An independent press with its own sources of revenue based in a specific city, embedded in the structures of that city, whether that’s unions, politics, religion, everything else, is an organic thing, with a life of its own. You can’t tell the people of your own city, who pay for your newspaper, that their kids aren’t getting sick, or that vaccines work when they don’t, or else they won’t buy your newspaper anymore. Now we’ve replaced that landscape, which was founded on trust, with a new AstroTurf-ed landscape of monopoly information platforms which are all being censored and marionetted in real time by the U.S. government. Where the White House is literally making phone calls saying shut down this guy’s Twitter account. That’s a weird transformation that happened pretty fast.

Posted in Conspiracy, Vaccination | Comments Off on David Samuels Interview RFK Jr

Gen Z

Joe Moran writes:

Post-millennials can quickly convey their pleasure or displeasure through memes. They use emojis as a ‘social lubricant’ and bracket words with asterisks and tildes for emphasis and irony. Whether they write ‘k’ or ‘kk’ to mean ‘OK’ is charged with meaning. The first is curt; the second is cheerful and casual, a way to temper the brusqueness of the single letter. These tonal shadings matter because post-millennials like to state their intentions clearly. Self-labelling, especially of fine-grained sexual and gendered identities, has become an ‘imperative’. They think it important to be themselves, to admit their struggles and vulnerabilities, to say what they mean. In the iGen Corpus, a digital data bank compiled by Ogilvie of seventy million words used by post-millennials, terms such as real, true, honest and fake occur far more often than in general language use.

According to Katz et al, in a world where so many things compete for their attention, the students they interview worry about allocating their time efficiently. They dislike email, finding it laborious compared to texting and messaging. ‘If it’s a professor you don’t have a close relationship with, you have to say, hi professor whatever, I’m in your class or I’m interested in this blah blah blah,’ one student says. ‘You have to kind of frame it.’ Several of the students surveyed watch recorded lectures at triple speed – not just to save time, but to help them concentrate. And yet nearly all the students interviewed for the book say that their favourite mode of communication is ‘in person’.

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Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology

From LROB:

* Shockley was a terrible manager and a passionate racist, who devoted his post-Nobel decades to publicising home-brewed theories about ‘dysgenics’ or genetic degradation and racial differences being a form of natural ‘colour-coding’ to warn about low intelligence.

* Miller cites the example of the Thanh Hóa Bridge, a vital transport artery in North Vietnam, which in 1965 was the target of 638 bombs, every one of which missed. Seven years later, the TI chips were incorporated in the same bombs, and the final set of air raids, on 13 May 1972, destroyed the bridge – a confirmation of the importance of the new technology in war, even if it was broadly ignored in the context of the US defeat. (The other wider significance of the Thanh Hóa Bridge was that the first big raid there was the occasion for an aerial dogfight in which the US, to its astonishment, lost a number of its most advanced aircraft to Vietnamese fighters. That shock to the system eventually led to the foundation of the fighter school memorialised in Top Gun, which in turn led to the 2022 sequel which was such a big-screen success that Steven Spielberg recently told Tom Cruise his movie had ‘saved the entire theatrical industry’. It’s the Thanh Hóa Bridge’s world – we’re just living in it.)

Posted in Computers | Comments Off on Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology