MOSSAD Showed Varadkar His Balls-Deep Epstein Videos And That Was A Wrap....,

apnews  |  Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who made history as his country’s first gay and first biracial leader, announced Wednesday that he is stepping down for reasons that he said were both personal and political.

Varadkar announced Wednesday he is quitting immediately as head of the center-right Fine Gael party, part of Ireland’s coalition government. He’ll be replaced as prime minister in April after a party leadership contest.

“My reasons for stepping down now are personal and political, but mainly political,” Varadkar said, without elaborating. He said he plans to remain in parliament as a backbench lawmaker and has “definite” future plans.

Varadkar, 45, has had two spells as taoiseach, or prime minister — between 2017 and 2020, and again since December 2022 as part of a job-share with Micheál Martin, head of coalition partner Fianna Fáil.

He was the country’s youngest-ever leader when first elected, as well as Ireland’s first openly gay prime minister. Varadkar, whose mother is Irish and father is Indian, was also Ireland’s first biracial taoiseach.

He played a leading role in campaigns to legalize same-sex marriage, approved in a 2015 referendum, and to repeal a ban on abortion, which passed in a vote in 2018.

“I’m proud that we have made the country a more equal and more modern place,” Varadkar said in a resignation statement in Dublin.

Varadkar was first elected to parliament in 2007, and once said he’d quit politics by the age of 50.

He led Ireland during the years after Britain’s 2016 decision to leave the European Union. Brexit had huge implications for Ireland, an EU member that shares a border with the U.K.’s Northern Ireland. U.K.-Ireland relations were strained while hardcore Brexit-backer Boris Johnson was U.K. leader, but have steadied since the arrival of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Varadkar recently returned from Washington, where he met President Joe Biden and other political leaders as part of the Irish prime minister’s traditional St. Patrick’s Day visit to the United States.

 

 

 

Evil Feminization of the West Won't Stop Short Of An Inquisition Level Bloodbath...,

racket  |  Hopkins reached out to me after listening in disgust to the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court hearing Monday. Standing was a big issue: our government said plaintiffs like Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Aaron Kheriaty lacked definite proof that the government was responsible for suppressing their speech. No such issue exists in CJ’s case, as you can see.

Hopkins also wanted Americans who might be up in arms about the specter of legalized censorship in their own country to see that the phenomenon has also spread to virtually every Western democracy, often in more extreme forms than we’ve seen so far in the United States.

CJ’s unique insight involves his ludicrous German case, which as you’ll read in the Q&A below has taken bizarre turns since we last checked and will now go to trial yet again. As an expat following the American situation from afar, he’s seen how the authoritarian tide is rising in similar or worse ways all around the globe. 

Hopkins is facing the business end of the German version, among the worst. As detailed last June, he was charged with “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.” The crime? Using a barely detectible Swastika in the cover image of his book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. Far from “furthering the aims” of Nazism, he was criticizing them by comparing Nazi methods and laws to those of modern health authorities. The offending image:

Hopkins went to trial in January and delivered an impassioned plea to the court. “Every journalist that has covered my case, everyone in this courtroom, understands what this prosecution is actually about,” he said. “It has nothing to do with punishing people who actually disseminate pro-Nazi propaganda. It is about punishing dissent, and making an example of dissidents in order to intimidate others into silence.”

Though the judge was clearly not a fan of Hopkins — a courtroom account by Aya Velázquez, which I recommend reading, described how the judge said CJ’s statements were “ideological drivel,” just “not punishable by law” — he won on the law.

After acquittal, he was made aware that technically the case wasn’t over, because thanks to a quirk of German jurisprudence, the prosecutor had a week to file an appeal. Hopkins was unconcerned. “I doubt he will [re-file]. He made a total fool of himself in front of a large audience yesterday,” he wrote. “I can’t imagine that he will want to do that again.”

Bzzt! Wrong. The prosecutor re-filed charges. The prosecutorial theory in the Hopkins case was based on a bizarre interpretation of hate crime, essentially asserting that if you have to think about an image to realize it’s satire, it can’t be allowed. If that idea spreads, it would make comedy or even sharp commentary impossible. This is why his indictment, and the similar investigation of Roger Waters, are really serious moments. Not to be heavy-handed, but eliminating the loophole for satire or mockery is exactly what Waters meant by “Another Brick in the Wall.” Before you know it, it’ll be toohigh to see over.

 

What's That Smell? Like Censorship, Lawfare Is Yet Another Feminine Ethical Hygiene Problem....,

thehill  |  Channeling Tennessee Williams in his play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Judge Scott McAfee wrote that, after their testimony, there remained “an odor of mendacity.”

That odor was particularly strong after the hearings indicated that Wade may have committed perjury in his earlier divorce case, and that both Willis and Wade were credibly accused of lying on the stand about when their relationship began. 

They are prosecuting defendants in the Trump case accused of the same underlying conduct, including  19 individual counts of false statements, false filings or perjury.

Yet, that distinct odor noted by Judge McAfee goes beyond the sordid affairs of Willis and Wade.

For many citizens, mendacity, or dishonesty, is wafting from various courtrooms around the country. The odor is becoming intolerable for many Americans as selective prosecution is being raised in a wide array of cases.

The problem is that courts have made it virtually impossible to use this claim to dismiss counts. Yet there is a disturbing level of merit to some of these underlying objections.

For years, conservatives have objected that there is a two-tier system of justice in this country. I have long resisted such claims, but it has become increasingly difficult to deny the obvious as selective prosecution in a variety of recent cases and opinions.

I have long stated that the charges against Trump over documents at Mar-a-Lago are strong and based on established precedent. However, the recent decision of Special Counsel Robert Hur not to bring criminal charges against President Joe Biden has undermined even that case.

Hur described four decades of Biden serially violating laws governing classified documents. The evidence included Biden telling a third party that he had classified material in his house and actually reading from a classified document to his non-cleared ghostwriter. There is evidence of an effort to destroy evidence and later an effort of the White House to change the report. There is also Biden’s repeated denial of any knowledge or memory of the documents found in nine locations where he worked or lived. 

Hur ultimately had to justify the lack of charges based on a belief that he could not secure a conviction from a D.C. jury with an elderly defendant with diminished mental faculties.  

Although Special Counsel Jack Smith could still proceed on obstruction counts, his prosecution of Trump for the retention and mishandling of national security documents is absurdly in conflict with the treatment Biden is receiving.

In New York, the legislature changed the statute of limitations to allow Trump to be sued while New York Attorney General Letitia James effectively ran on a pledge of selectively prosecuting him. She never specified any particular crime, just promising to bag Trump.

 

Arbitrary Enforcement Of Federal Law Roils Classified Documents Case

declassified  |  Jack Smith's Florida case. "[Judge Aileen] Cannon repeatedly asked both sides for examples of criminal prosecution for 'other officials who did the same.' She questioned the 'arbitrary enforcement' of the espionage statute, forcing the government to admit that no other former president or vice president has faced criminal prosecution for keeping similar documents and failing to return them.

'This speaks to the arbitrary enforcement...featuring in this case,' Cannon told Bratt. Cannon also pushed back on claims Trump should have expected to face prosecution for storing classified files. Once again noting no former president or vice president-Mike Pence also discovered classified records after Trump was indicted in 2023-has been charged, Cannon suggested it was fair for Trump to expect the same treatment since 'no historical precedent' is on the books. 'Given that landscape,' Cannon continued, Trump could argue he has been unfairly targeted. Which his team already has. 

In a motion emailed to the court and the government last month, Trump's attorneys asked to dismiss the case based on 'selective and vindictive prosecution.' Although the motion is not public, Jack Smith quickly responded to defend the Department of Justice's choice to pursue Trump and not Biden. 'Trump, unlike Biden, is alleged to have engaged in extensive and repeated efforts to obstruct justice and thwart the return of documents bearing classification markings, which provides particularly strong evidence of willfulness and is a paradigmatic aggravating factor that prosecutors routinely rely on when making charging decisions,' Smith wrote in a March 7 response. 'Second, the evidence concerning the two men's intent-whether they knowingly possessed and willfully retained such documents-is starkly different.' 

In an almost comical passage, Smith admits Biden unlawfully retained classified records-just not as many as Trump. 'Biden possessed 88 documents bearing classification markings, including 18 marked Top Secret. By contrast, Trump possessed 337 documents bearing classification markings, including 64 marked Top Secret.

America's Elite Disconnect

darkfutura  |  The one seeming contradiction is that these elites predominantly “live in zipcodes exceeding a population density of 10,000 people per square mile.” This misleading implies they live in large cities like New York, where they would in fact be forced to endure daily commingling with the peasantry. In reality, we know they sit entrenched in highly sequestered aristocrats’ quarters within these cities—like the Upper East Side in Manhattan, or Kalorama in D.C. Being shuttled in swank car service to and fro, they rarely deign to cross paths with the commoners for whom they have nothing but contempt, apart from some token quick-grab at the corner coffee-and-bun kiosk to reassure themselves that they’re ‘in touch’ with the slipstream of society. 

In many respects, this is an age-old problem: elites have always existed in parallel societies. However, the advent of digital and social media technologies have allowed them to encase themselves in an ever-impermeable confirmation bias bubble like never before. Listen to interviews with top Washington policymakers, corporate bigwigs, etc., and note how they exclusively mainline the most mainstream corporate publications like WaPo, NYTimes, etc. It becomes its own hermetic self-referencing feedback loop increasingly shut-off from the real outside world of human experience.

As the earlier NYPost article described:

If America is to avoid a tailspin into this toxic feedback loop, its elites will need to step outside their bubble, stop conforming in an effort to blend in with their myopic peers and start addressing the legitimate grievances of their fellow Americans.

This explains such things as the elites’ obsession with climate change, as that is one issue that exists solely ‘on paper’—as an abstraction—and is not realistically felt in the common quarters. The aristos who repeatedly reflect their own shrill echochamber alarmism on this issue get increasingly radicalized, particularly given that—as reported earlier—they put far more store in institutions of authority than the average prole. This results in the calcification of their blind belief in specters like climate change, despite their paying only lip service to it, and not acting accordingly in light of such an existential ‘threat’.

The problem is exacerbated by social ills which create divisions along gender lines, disproportionately giving weight to female-centric concerns, as per the Longhouse theory:

The Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.

Women are naturally wired to be more sympathetic—and thus suggestible—to the social engineering imperatives co-opting the current narrative. Men are being increasingly pushed out from higher education, which means that even among the elites funnelled upward, the stances skew increasingly to the ‘Longhouse’:

This feminization of the managerial class can be seen from a variety of vantage points:

As everyone is now aware, unmarried women by far make the most disproportionate jump into Democrat Land, as well as increasingly radicalized hyperliberal policies—which reflects in other interesting ways:

As an aside, one X user had a topically cogent comment about the screenshot below:

Most of the bluecheck unpacking of the collapsing male college enrollment story focuses on how worrisome it is that these men won't espouse elite political opinions

But one of the most revealing disparities in the Rasmussen survey showed just how out of touch the elites are specifically to economic issues which affect the plebs most—as opposed to the airy abstractions of fringe intellectual culture war issues:

 

Fiona Hill: Credulous Replacement Negroe Weaponized Against Donald Trump

pbs  |   Judy Woodruff: Ultimately, what was your assessment of Donald Trump as a person and as a president?

Fiona Hill: Well, as a person, he was extremely vulnerable to manipulation. And that became a problem for him as a president.

And what I mean by that is, he had a very fragile ego, and he was very susceptible to flattery, as well as taking massive offense, as we all saw, to any kind of criticism. So, on a personal level, that was also a pretty dangerous flaw.

When you're the president of the United States, it becomes a fatal flaw, because President Trump couldn't disassociate or disentangle himself from many of the issues that were the critical ones to address. So, when people were concerned about Russian influence in the United States election, he only thought about how that affected him, for example.

When people talked about the changes in the U.S. economic structure, he would always think, first of all, about how that might affect him and about how that might affect how people would vote for him. So, as a president, he was uniquely preoccupied with himself, not with the country.

And that, of course, made all of the problems of intelligence risks even higher, because the Russians or others from the outside could also manipulate those tendencies.

Judy Woodruff: So, if you can answer this, is the world safer or is it more dangerous because of his presidency?

Fiona Hill: Well, I think it's become more dangerous, because he was also extremely divisive, because President Trump was very focused on getting reelected, and he wasn't going to do that by appealing to all Americans.

He wanted to appeal to a particular base of people who were attracted by his personality or attracted by the things that he said he was going to do for them. And, of course, that's on different parts of the economic scale and the socioeconomic lower levels. It's the people — he said he was going to find them a job. He was going to fix the economy, so they would have jobs.

At the top end, among millionaires and billionaires, it was that he was going to protect their fortunes, from — being from those circles himself.

Judy Woodruff: What I find so striking is that you weren't so concerned about Donald Trump being controlled by Vladimir Putin, being influenced by Vladimir Putin, as you were concerned about the United States following on the same political path that you see Russia follow under Vladimir Putin.

Fiona Hill: That's absolutely right, because Russia went through a similar wrenching economic period and political periods in the 1990s.

So, Russia had its equivalent of a kind of the Great Recession, and, at the end of that decade, President Putin comes in and says, I'm going to fix everything. I'm going to make America great again, which, of course, is what President Trump said in 2016. And what Putin did was basically tie himself up into all of these politics.

He, of course, has extended his terms in office through amending the Constitution. He can essentially be president until 2036. And Donald Trump has also said that he wants to be president in perpetuity. He wouldn't accept that he had lost the 2020 election. He's saying he's going to come back, that he has a right to come back because he was never kicked out of office in the first place.

And he's been spreading lies about essentially his own role in all the events that we have seen over the last years, January 6, for example, and the storming of the Capitol.

Judy Woodruff: Do you believe our democracy is in danger as a result of this?

Fiona Hill: I do.

And I think that danger is increasing by the day, because we're constantly seeing other political figures trying to emulate Trump. We're now in a situation where lies and deceit have become the coin of governance.

Judy Woodruff: It's a disturbing conclusion in this book.

Fiona Hill, thank you very much.

Alissa Heinerscheid Gets That Richly Deserved Foot In Her Silly Ass...,

adage  |  Anheuser-Busch InBev has changed marketing leadership for Bud Light in the wake of controversy over the brand sending a can to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney with her face on it.

Alissa Heinerscheid, marketing VP for the brand since June 2022, has taken a leave of absence, the brewer confirmed, and will be replaced by Todd Allen, who was most recently global marketing VP for Budweiser.

Heinerscheid did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

The brewer has also streamlined its marketing function to reduce layers “so that our most senior marketers are more closely connected to every aspect of our brand’s activities,” a company spokesperson said in a statement, adding that “these steps will help us maintain focus on the things we do best: brewing great beer for all consumers, while always making a positive impact in our communities and on our country.”

The statement noted that “we communicated some next steps with our internal teams and wholesaler partners,” adding that “we made it clear that the safety and welfare of our employees and our partners is our top priority.”

Dylan Mulvaney's Mimicry Of White Women Is Absurd

thecritic.co.uk  |  If a man seeks to humiliate a woman he encounters, nothing is easier than reducing her appearance to a mere caricature. Men do this directly in front of the woman they are targeting: lifting their voice to a squeak, exaggerating hand gestures, pushing out pretend breasts, wiggling their bum, pouting and fiddling with their hair. Most of these men confine the taunt to the woman in front of them, and the woman often feels and displays a righteous rage. However, when it comes to Dylan Mulvaney, the Tik Tok user who has become famous for his grotesque parody of women, women are not supposed to react critically. They are seen as cruel or “transphobic” if they express annoyance at being so grossly insulted. 

In March 2022 Dylan Mulvaney saw a way to take his barely-concealed disdain for women up a level, with predictable success. After his career as a musical actor had stalled due to the Covid pandemic, with people finding solace daily on Tik Tok, wily Dylan invented a new role that guaranteed his future wealth and success. He announced he was embarking on a journey of “being a girl” and began a series of videos documenting this ludicrous notion. 

Women see this for the deliberately constructed misogyny it is

Shortly before this year-long, very public “transition”, Mulvaney performed a pilot video for his current lucrative act. In it he told the viewer that he “had trouble finding roles” so a friend had invented one for him, a “femme character”. His character wears a pink dress and pearls, white gloves and ankle socks. At this point Mulvaney must have been delighted to glimpse a potential new career path. It was a very savvy move for him to extend and develop this caricature of a 1950s woman. Now, just over a year later, Dylan Mulvaney has highly paid “partnerships” with a number of companies including Budweiser, Kate Spade and — during the past week, to great objection — the Sportwear giant Nike. 

In an inflammatory paid partnership video with Nike, an inanely grinning, barefoot Mulvaney wears a Nike sports bra and leggings. He performs a series of ridiculous moves including comedic side stretches, a theatrical run kicking his heels up nonsensically and failed chorus-line high kicks. He almost runs backwards into a hedge at one point and pulls a comedy expression of shock. It all looks ridiculous and slapstick. It mocks women by suggesting they exercise trivially and ineffectively, but smiling throughout. 

The media seems unwilling to focus on the actual reasons many women are angry about this. It has focused instead on stating that objections to the sponsorship are because Dylan is trans. This is not why women are outraged. When a man “performs woman” in front of women to such a humiliating degree, when he waggles and jiggles and implies that weakness and silliness are inherent to being a woman who plays sport, women appropriately see this for the deliberately constructed misogyny it is. Ria Chapman, a London PE teacher, told me why she finds this act so irritating and offensive:

Girls are still routinely bullied and mocked for being sporty and or breaking stereotypes, their achievements and ambitions not being celebrated and valued like those of their male peers. For a sports company the size of Nike to use a male performing a parody of what he believes women behave like during sport only adds to the ammunition that boys will use to put girls down.

Utilising female stereotypes is the foundation of Mulvaney’s role. On his “Day 1 of being a girl” video debut, he said:

I’ve already cried three times, written a scathing email I didn’t send, ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford and when someone asked me how I was, I said “I’m fine” but I wasn’t fine. How did I do, ladies?

All of this encapsulates the stereotype of women as emotionally fragile, frivolous spendthrifts, imprudent around clothes and financially inept. In the stereotype Dylan performs, women routinely suppress our emotions and focus on being polite at all times. It is an archaic depiction of requisite female behaviour which was seared into women’s consciousness over decades in the past. This view of “girlhood” took further decades for feminist women to dismantle. Dylan Mulvaney is building it back up before our eyes and we refuse to stay quiet about it.

Wokeness: Linguistic, Symbolic, Emotional Correctness Enforced Via Mutual Surveillance

freddiedeboer  |  “Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.

Woke is defined by several consistent attributes. Woke is

Academic - the terminology of woke politics is an academic terminology, which is unsurprising given its origins in humanities departments of elite universities. Central to woke discourse is the substitution of older and less complicated versions of socially liberal perspectives with more willfully complex academic versions. So civil rights are out, “anti-racism” is in. Community is out, intersectionality is in. Equality is out, equity is in. Homelessness is out, unhousedness is in. Sexism is out, misogyny is in. Advantage is out, privilege is in. Whenever there’s an opportunity to introduce an alternative concept that’s been wrung through academia’s weird machinery, that opportunity is taken. This has the advantage of making political engagement available only to a priestly caste that has enjoyed the benefits of elite university education; like all political movements, the woke political movement is captured by the urge to occupy elevated status within it.

Immaterial - woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real. Woke politics are famously obsessive about language, developing literal language policies that are endlessly long and exacting. Utterances are mined for potential offense with pitiless focus, such that statements that were entirely anodyne a few years ago become unspeakable today. Being politically pure is seen as a matter of speaking correctly rather than of acting morally. The woke fixation on language and symbol makes sense when you realize that the developers of the ideology are almost entirely people whose profession involves the immaterial and the symbolic - professors, writers, reporters, artists, pundits. They retreat to the linguistic because they feel that words are their only source of power. Consider two recent events: the Academy Awards giving Oscars to many people of color and Michigan repealing its right-to-work law. The latter will have vastly greater positive consequences for actually-existing American people of color than the former, and yet the former has been vastly better publicized. This is a direct consequence of the incentive structure of woke politics.

Structural in analysis, individual in action - the woke perspective is one that tends to see the world’s problems as structural in nature rather than the product of individual actors or actions. Sometimes the problems are misdiagnosed or exaggerated, but the structural focus is beneficial. Curiously, though, the woke approach to solutions to politics is relentlessly individualistic. Rather than calling for true mass movements (which you cannot create without the moderation and compromise the social justice set tends to abhor), woke politics typically treats all political struggle as a matter of the individual mastering themselves and behaving correctly. The fundamental unit of politics is not the masses but the enlightened person, in the social justice mindset, and the enlightened person is one who has attained a state of moral cleanliness, particularly as expressed in language. The structural problems (such as racism) are represented as fundamentally combated with individual moral correctness (such as articulated in White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, which argues that racism is combated by white people interrogating their souls rather than with policy). The only real political project is the struggle against the self; the only real political victory is the mastery of one’s thoughts. The distinction between the effective political actor and the morally hygienic thinker is collapsed. You combat homophobia by being gay-affirming. You combat misogyny by respecting women. You combat all social ills by relentlessly fixating on your own position in society and feeling bad about it. Nothing political can escape the gravity of personal psychodrama and no solutions exist but cleansing the self.

Emotionalist - “emotionalist” rather than emotional, meaning not necessarily inappropriately emotional but concerned fundamentally with emotions as the currency of politics. In woke circles, political problems are regularly diagnosed as a matter of the wrong emotions being inspired in someone. Someone feeling “invalid” is no longer an irrelevant matter of personal psychology best left to a therapist but instead a political problem to be solved, and anyone who provoked that feeling is someone who has committed a political crime no matter what the context or pretext.

Anosognosia: The Biggest Risk Is Not Knowing What You're Doing

NYTimes  |  On Saturday, an entrepreneur named Alexander Torrenegra, who was an S.B.V. depositor for two companies as well as his own personal accounts, explained what happened on Twitter. “Thursday, 9 AM: in one chat with 200+ tech founders (most in the Bay Area), questions about SVB start to show up.” he wrote. “10 AM: some suggest getting the money out of SVB for safety. Only upside. No downside.”

It’s easy to see how a whisper network of a few hundred C.E.O.s — all convinced they have exceptional vision, all working themselves into a panic — could spiral out of control. But what happened in that chat is an extension of the fundamental way that these venture capitalists operate, which is groupthink on a staggeringly consequential scale.

Top tier firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins subject candidates to a rigorous screening process that ensures that only the strongest founders leading the most promising businesses proceed to the next level. Or that’s what I once believed, anyway. But the screening process places significant emphasis on “culture fit,” which is industry speak for whether a founder fits into the venture capital firm’s full portfolio of companies and conforms to their ideas about how a founder is supposed to look and behave. A founder’s ability to navigate this process is considered a good indicator of the company’s success. Unfortunately for women and people of color, culture fit often boils down to being a white male engineer with a degree from an elite university.

Some screening mechanisms are more subtle, like whether the V.C.s are already in your professional network, or one or two degrees removed. The industry line is that relationships will help founders attract capital, talent, and business partners. True, but the result is a largely homogeneous and even self-reinforcing community that’s difficult for outsiders to crack.

It’s this sort of insularity, emphasis on existing relationships, and reliance on intangible measures of competency that fueled last week’s bank run. The V.C.s expect the companies in their portfolio to use approved vendors. When it comes to legal counsel, that generally means tech-friendly law firms like Morrison & Foerster or Wilson Sonsini. When it comes to banks, it has meant S.V.B.

S.V.B., in turn, assessed its clients’ creditworthiness in part by who their funders were. As my colleagues and I saw, an investment from a top tier V.C. could be the ticket to a package of favored services, including things like home mortgages for the founders of these start-ups.

I opened my account at S.V.B. in 2017, when I had meetings lined up with some top tier V.C.s to raise money for a digital media company. Like everyone else who heads to Buck’s of Woodside (a favored venue for early-stage deal making) with a deck and a dream, I tried to anticipate the screening mechanisms and make sure I passed. And despite the fact that I was not a first-time founder, and having worked in tech and tech adjacent companies, was decently well networked, I suspected they might regard a 40-year-old woman without an engineering degree as not quite the culture fit of their dreams. I wasn’t contractually obligated to bank with S.V.B., but as with so many other unspoken norms, I was aware that I would be evaluated by my choices.

Disaster has now struck, but I don’t see any public introspection from the investment community participants who both helped create the dangerous conditions and triggered the avalanche by directing portfolio companies to withdraw en masse.

Musk Has Chosen To Make Common Cause With Idiot Trolls And Unapologetic Bigots

 

Slate  |  Musk is the richest man in the world and yet comports himself online like a pustulous incel on a Mountain Dew bender. Though Taibbi and Weiss were each once ensconced at the absolute top of the American mainstream media—Weiss at the opinion section of the New York Times, Taibbi as a star writer for Rolling Stone—both have since migrated to Substack, where they each run popular and lucrative newsletters that exist to bite the hands that once fed them

Their shared thesis, to oversimplify, is that the mainstream media, Big Tech, and other important cultural institutions now follow a shared set of ultra-liberal speech codes that have been imposed from within by woke young employees. Cowed by their strident staffers, executives at these institutions have allegedly abdicated their leadership responsibilities and have, so to speak, allowed the inmates to run the asylum. Dare to express opinions that transgress these implicit speech codes—dare to say anything that might offend even a single “social justice warrior” within these spheres—and you’ll quickly find yourself excommunicated. The broader implications of this alleged ideological uniformity, Taibbi and Weiss argue, are devastating for speech and democracy.

And actually, fair enough. There is ample historical precedent for leftist political movements using speech codes as tools to empower repressive regimes, just as there are countless moments in history when right-wing dipshits have stoked moral panics rooted in cultural revanchism and risible claims of conspiracy in order to consolidate power and influence for their own curdled ends. The challenge and obligation of citizenship in a democracy involves, in part, remaining alert to the various strains of demagoguery that are circulating at any given period of time, accurately assessing the relative threats that they pose to democratic principles, and taking notice when prominent voices seem intent on deflecting your attention from mountains while warning endlessly about molehills.

American democracy has indeed taken a bit of a beating over the past few years, but the most violent blows have been landed by the Trumpist right and its opportunistic enablers. While neither Taibbi nor Weiss is blind to the threats that Trumpism has posed to democracy, their recent output sure does make it seem as if the predominant crisis facing America today is one of creeping illiberalism and ideological uniformity in tech, media, and the Democratic Party. Though Taibbi and Weiss do not self-classify as conservatives, the drum that they’ve been banging for a few years now is functionally indistinguishable from the one that the American right wing has been banging for as long as I’ve been alive—a concordance that matters intensely when attempting to parse the import of the Twitter Files.

 

Slate Let Some Soyboys Run Their Mouths Reckless Before The Friday File Drop...,

Slate |   Musk’s rightward drift is one of the most scrutinized storylines in the tech sector. After fashioning himself as an ecological visionary dedicated to saving human civilization from disaster through clean energy, space colonization, and a thick portfolio filled with generous government contracts, Musk has recently solidified himself as a fringe, sideshow mouthpiece for the Lauren Boebert wing of the GOP. (He still claims to be a centrist, in the same way that commentator Tim Pool claims to be a disaffected liberal.) All of the man’s established precepts have been swapped out with issues that reek of a distinctly paleoconservative tang. For instance: He now believes that swooning birth rates are a bigger threat to the human race than climate change is. Musk has carried that philosophy into his management approach, and has operated his newly purchased social network with the cloying, unserious cruelty of so many unaccountable titans of capital before him: mass layoffs, hollowing austerity measures, and yes, a willingness to frequently rub elbows with guys like Ian Miles Cheong. It is as if his sole desire is to be hated by liberals, which appears to be the only animating praxis of the entire Republican Party.

I’m not here to home in on the particulars of Musk’s politics. (I already did that, a month ago.) In fact, I’d argue that his recent redpilling is barely relevant to why his stewardship of Twitter has been so uniquely agitating. Sure, it isn’t ideal that Musk has restored the accounts of guys like Jordan Peterson, but I am not of the opinion that social media has much effect on corporeal reality. (May I reiterate one more time: the midterms!) Instead, the worst part about Musk’s Twitter tenure is that he is simply bad at posting. He was consistently one of the most oppressive presences on social media in the mid-2010s, back when he was promising to dig a tunnel from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and he’s only grown more obnoxious as he attempts to fabricate a strained MAGA pivot while he slowly loses all of his famous friends. We have handed over the Crucible of Posting to someone who has a remedial understanding of the art; honestly, that might be the impetus for his radicalization.

There’s already a lot of literature that’s been published on Musk’s shortcomings as a poster. In 2021 the New York Times went long on the frequency at which Elon pilfers memes he finds on Reddit without proper accreditation (a big no-no—just ask @FuckJerry). The underlying thesis here is that he was never able to engineer the creativity, humor, or cultural fluency necessary to become an elite tweeter, so, like innumerable struggling YouTubers and canceled podcast hosts before him, Musk has started playing to the cheap seats by taking on the woke mob in the name of free speech, which has, frankly, become the hackiest and most overplayed hand on social media.

Slate |  You are Elon Musk. You possess the not-wholly-unjustified sense that you can beat anyone in business combat. Being the richest guy in the world confers a certain steamrolling feeling that is hard to shake. Some of that vibe is even grounded in reality. For example, you can more or less use securities law as toilet paper while building up shares in Twitter and not lose a wink of sleep over it. You can hire excellent lawyers and deploy them for limitless hours against your critics and enemies. The worst day of your life is still a day in which you have more wealth than anybody else.

Some of this strength is only in your head, though. Being you has privileges and curses, and one of each is that you’re surrounded in large part by sycophants. Some of them have fancy jobs and want to do business with you. Most of them, numbering somewhere in the millions, will never meet you but will cheer you on all the while, believing there is genius in everything you do. They will believe you can browbeat an extremely well-lawyered public company into getting out of a deal that has no apparent legal out. (To be fair, Wall Street may also believe that.) When you get stuck buying that company, and things immediately get rough, you might pick a fight with the most valuable company in the history of the world. What looks like desperation to most people will look like a stroke of nine-dimensional chess to your fanbase. You could accidentally shoot yourself in the testicles with a rifle, and your most devout followers would spot a long game to start a prosthetic genital company at a $2 trillion valuation.

Affirmative Action - Civil Rights - White Women

Time |   While people of color, individually and as groups, have been helped by affirmative action in the subsequent years, data and studies suggest women — white women in particular — have benefited disproportionately. According to one study, in 1995, 6 million women, the majority of whom were white, had jobs they wouldn’t have otherwise held but for affirmative action.

Another study shows that women made greater gains in employment at companies that do business with the federal government, which are therefore subject to federal affirmative-action requirements, than in other companies — with female employment rising 15.2% at federal contractors but only 2.2% elsewhere. And the women working for federal-contractor companies also held higher positions and were paid better.

Even in the private sector, the advancements of white women eclipse those of people of color. After IBM established its own affirmative-action program, the numbers of women in management positions more than tripled in less than 10 years. Data from subsequent years show that the number of executives of color at IBM also grew, but not nearly at the same rate.

wikipedia |  As chairman of the United States House Committee on Rules starting in 1954,^[5] Smith controlled the flow of legislation in the House. An opponent of racial integration, Smith used his power as chairman of the Rules Committee to keep much civil rights legislation from coming to a vote on the House floor.

He was a signatory to the 1956 Southern Manifesto that opposed the desegregation of public schools ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). A friend described him as someone who "had a real feeling of kindness toward the black people he knew, but he did not respect the race."^[6]

When the Civil Rights Act of 1957 came before Smith's committee, Smith said, "The Southern people have never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal intelligence and education and social attainments as the whole people of the South."^[7] Others noted him as an apologist for slavery who used the Ancient Greeks and Romans in its defense.^[6]

Speaker Sam Rayburn tried to reduce his power in 1961, with only limited success.

Smith delayed passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. One of Rayburn's reforms was the "Twenty-One Day Rule" that required a bill to be sent to the floor within 21 days. Under pressure, Smith released the bill.

Two days before the vote, Smith offered an amendment to insert "sex" after the word "religion" as a protected class of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Congressional Record shows Smith made serious arguments, voicing concerns that white women would suffer greater discrimination without a protection for gender.^[8] Reformers, who knew Smith was hostile to civil rights for blacks, assumed that he was doing so to defeat the whole bill.^[9][10] In 1968, Leo Kanowitz wrote that, within the context of the anti-civil rights coalition making "every effort to block" the passage of Title VII, "it is abundantly clear that a principal motive in introducing ["sex"] was to prevent passage of the basic legislation being considered by Congress, rather than solicitude for women's employment rights."^[11] Kanowitz notes that Representative Edith Green, who was one of the few female legislators in the House at that time, held that view that legislation against sex discrimination in employment "would not have received one hundred votes," indicating that it would have been defeated handedly.

House Rules Committee clerk's record of markup session adding "sex" to bill.

In 1964, the burning national issue was civil rights for blacks. Activists argued that it was "the Negro's hour" and that adding women's rights to the bill could hurt its chance of being passed. However, opponents voted for the Smith amendment. The National Woman's Party (NWP) had used Smith to include sex as a protected category and so achieved their main goal.^[12]

The prohibition of sex discrimination was added on the floor by Smith. While Smith strongly opposed civil rights laws for blacks, he supported such laws for women. Smith's amendment passed by a vote of 168 to 133.^[10][13][14]

Smith expected that Republicans, who had included equal rights for women in their party's platform since 1940, would probably vote for the amendment. Some historians speculate that Smith, in addition to helping women, was trying to embarrass Northern Democrats, who opposed civil rights for women since labor unions opposed the clause.^[8]

Karens - How's That Vaccine Mandate Political Payback Working Out For You?

amidwesterndoctor  |  One of the tremendously frustrating experiences I have had during my lifetime has been watching an amazing candidate run for president, be widely liked by the voting base because of their excellent track record in standing up for the working class, and then watch the media systematically torpedo each and every one of their campaigns. 

The only person I have ever seen who was able to address this dilemma was Donald Trump, as he took a rather unorthodox approach where he campaigned on the basis of the media being evil.  As a result, each time the media gave him negative attention it helped rather than hindered his campaign, and before long he was able to pull the mass media into a symbiotic relationship where it could not help but continually provide oxygen to Trump’s campaign.  

The upside of this approach was that it provided Trump with the freedom to advance populist positions that went against the vested interests of the financiers of the corporate media, something very few other presidents have done.  The downside of this approach was that it was incredibly polarizing, and divided the country to the point that the left was willing to force through vaccine mandates as a way of getting back at the right.  While it is important to advance populist positions that go against entrenched interests (and to expose the systemic corruption within the media), there was a tremendous cost to the political polarization this approach created we will likely be stuck with for years to come.

Something that is often not appreciated about the media is that their business model is based upon getting as much viewership as possible and to provide content that appeases their advertisers. For this reason, content that is critical of any sponsor is never allowed to air.  As a result most media programming is meaningless stories that do not challenge any vested interest and are emotionally hyped up as much as possible to antagonize the audience so that the audience is drawn into caring about them.

Given that the largest sponsor of the mainstream media is the pharmaceutical industry, it is not surprising that all news content aggressively promotes the pharmaceutical party line (the only occasional exceptions I know of are Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham).  One of the ethical journalists who has spoken out the most on this issue is Sharyl Atkinson, who in one interview specifically noted that she observed a variety of major changes occur in the media that coincided with her suddenly being forbidden from ever discussing vaccine safety concerns on air.

It is difficult to assign blame for the botched pandemic response to any single party. However, if I have to identify the key culprit, I would argue that the rigid censorship by the mainstream media, big tech and the academic publishing institutions was what allowed the insane pandemic policy is to march forward despite being clearly in opposition to most existing scientific evidence. In the same way that pharmaceutical corruption has gradually taken over the legacy media (the Gates Foundation for example frequently gives media grants to ensure their massages dominate the airwaves), these other media venues are likewise highly susceptible to pernicious influence, which is why independent media platforms are so critical moving forward.

Speaking Of Sexual Degenerates, Let's Not Forget Illinois Very Own Harkonnen Family (Pritzkers)

tabletmag | One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

I first wrote about the Pritzkers, whose fortune originated in the Hyatt hotel chain, and their philanthropy directed toward normalizing what people call “transgenderism” in 2018. I have since stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and which ended in 2020 with Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that LGBTQ+ is a protected class for discrimination purposes—is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

Through investments in the techno-medical complex, where new highly medicalized sex identities are being conjured, Pritzkers and other elite donors are attempting to normalize the idea that human reproductive sex exists on a spectrum. These investments go toward creating new SSI using surgeries and drugs, and by instituting rapid language reforms to prop up these new identities and induce institutions and individuals to normalize them. In 2018, for example, at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at the University of California Los Angeles (where the Pritzkers are major donors and hold various titles), the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology advertised several options for young females who think they can be men to have their reproductive organs removed, a procedure termed “gender-affirming care.”

Felicia Sonmez Stirred Up A Wokestorm At The Bezos Post

vanityfair | The Post’s guild responded Tuesday to the disputes playing out online. “Guild leadership has tried hard to run our union in a way that centers kindness, respect, fairness, and empathy while holding people and institutions we care about accountable. It’s our hope that all Washington Post employees keep that in mind when one of us makes a mistake and we are tasked with being part of the accountability process,” Katie Mettler, who has been cochair of the Post Guild for more than three years, told me. “In the last few years, hundreds of guild members—often led by women and people of color—have worked relentlessly and thoughtfully together to advocate for more fair and inclusive systems at the Post.” She added, “We are doing the work to hold all our institutions and ourselves to a high standard, and we will keep doing that work in ways big and small, public and private.”

In the past, Sonmez has had widespread support in the newsroom; hundreds of colleagues signed a letter on her behalf in 2020, after Baron suspended her for tweeting an article detailing a rape allegation against NBA legend Kobe Bryant shortly after his death. (A “newsroom revolt” is how this publication described it at the time.) Soon after the paper’s guild sent that letter to management, she was reinstated. But since then, there have been multiple instances of Sonmez calling out the paper publicly—and she has done so internally in response to a staff email as well.

About two weeks ago, Gold, the National editor, sent out an email urging colleagues to “take time to assess how you are doing” and “seek help if you need to talk to someone” in the wake of the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde and the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. “Just a reminder that I was punished after I told an editor that I had to take a walk around the block after reading a difficult story,” Sonmez replied—to the entire National staff—according to emails reviewed by Vanity Fair. One reporter noted that Sonmez has said both publicly and privately that she’s still at the Post because she wants to help fix things. “Discouraging reporters at the Post from seeking help they need—that’s actively being part of the problem,” they told me. “This idea that she’s fighting for sexism and gender, while that might have felt true at some point, now just rings disingenuous, even for people who want to give her the benefit of the doubt.” 

On Thursday, after the initial publication of this article, Sonmez responded on Twitter: “I stand by what I wrote in that email. In 2018, I was punished after I told my editors I needed to take a walk around the block after reading a difficult story. Other colleagues have been punished for their trauma far more recently, but their stories aren’t mine to tell. I’m not ‘discouraging reporters at the Post from seeking help they need.’ Far from it. The Washington Post’s own actions are doing that. I care deeply about my colleagues, and I want this institution to provide support for all employees. Right now, the Post is a place where many of us fear our trauma will be used against us, based on the company’s past actions.”

The thrust of Sonmez’s critique over the past few days has been about how the Post holds different journalists to different standards, and what message that sends about the Post’s values. Sonmez tweeted Sunday that Del Real had “publicly attacked” her for highlighting Weigel’s sexist retweet, writing, “When women stand up for themselves, some people respond with even more vitriol.” In another tweet in the thread, she dismissed the idea that objecting to sexism was “clout chasing”—Del Real’s words—and tagged Buzbee and Gold to ask if the paper agreed with her. On Monday and Tuesday, she was once again urging management, via Twitter, to intervene. 

“Working at a huge news organization—the Post, The New York Times, CNN—is like living in a big city where there are always emergencies,” one staffer said. An embarrassing correction for the Styles desk might be a fire; a story the Times beats the Post on, a flood. “As a colleague, you probably should be trying to help fund the fire department or city services and make it a better place to live; at worst, you’re not paying your taxes,” they continued. “And then you have Felicia, who is essentially pouring gasoline on every fire and inviting people to watch.”

Sonmez responded Thursday on Twitter: “To borrow an analogy, working at a big news organization is like living in a big city. Emergencies like corrections come up every day. That’s normal. Are sexist or racist tweets ‘normal’ emergencies? Is the denigration of a class of people a ‘normal’ emergency? Or are those things a sign of deeper problems within a newsroom rife with unequal treatment?”