The photo of Trump with Gruden may be from last week.
Helping organize information about the Jan 6 Capitol attack and those who planned it. They are still with us. also: @capitolhunters@mastodon.social email: capitol.hunters@gmail.com see bit.ly/Jan6Analysis
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The photo of Trump with Gruden may be from last week.
Then someone (who?) stakes him with investment $ (based on his 1 year experience at Credit Suisse?). That money makes his fortune, as he bets on what eventually becomes PayPal. Just a few years to transform from an unsuccessful ex-lawyer to the career arc that brings us to today. 2/2
Journalists leave out these key early stages. Thiel could plausibly have got the Bennett job from his Stanford Review reputation, but it would be nice to know how it happened. The next step is key: he gets picked up by the Independent Institute, which pays him to write "The Diversity Myth"... 1/2
Sadly, and stupidly, we should expect reductions in vaccines and public health campaigns and more nutcase research into immortality using our tax dollars. 2/
There's two parts to the dystopian health fantasia: mass death for the fragile and immortality for the chosen. The new Acting head of CDC, Jim O'Neill, is a Peter Thiel lietenant who ran a biotech firm looking to extend human lifetime. Silicon Valley elites want the elixir of life for themselves. 1/
The 2014 Epstein-Thiel meetings were reported - here's the NYT writing about it in 2023. Epstein was at least adjacent to the Silicon Valley obsession with surveillance and defense tech but it's not clear what the result was. (The Reason article is well-written btw!) web.archive.org/web/20230519...
That was a graceful acknowledgement of the independent journalist who reported the news first. Hopefully the NYT can learn from this.
Yes, that is exactly it.
They say that, but they aren't breaking with the system, really. That would mean no ego-fluffing panel discussions at Stanford with introductions by the president, no fake-associations with a scholarly heritage ('studied under' would be pretentious even for a grad student).
The pretension is their weak point. For all that Peter and his set say they want to tear down the system, they are just absolutely desperate to be part of it, fancy universities and credentials and fake-academic language.
Yes, though haven't dug into the Acts 17 Collective that is funding it. I guess the Commonwealth Club just caters to Silicon Valley fantasies now. This kind of language - that Peter "studied under" a philosopher at Stanford - shows the pretension, that he wants so badly to be seen as a scholar.
Sad that no local reporter has the time and willingness to dig in. Or maybe that there are no local reporters nearby anymore.
Did he scrub his online presence or just never have one? Can you tell?
Canada has been the target of disinfo campaigns: Canadian and US far-right propaganda operations are highly intertwined. Canada's Ezra Levant produced some of the influencers who spearheaded Jan 6. The Proud Boys came from Canada's Gavin McInnes. What is happening in the US can happen in Canada too.
Can some economists please speak up for their profession and explain that producing "abundance" is not so easy and if there were a single policy prescription that gave everyone infinite wealth and free energy and a pony we would have implemented it already? This whole movement is a cargo cult.
It was pretty obvious this was going to happen when the pick for the US ambassador to Denmark was Ken Howery, Peter Thiel's longtime pal. Thiel's set have a fixation on annexing Greenland. (And promoting separatist movements is an old, old, tactic.) bsky.app/profile/capi...
Counterthesis: tech elites are not really interested in the history of the Roman empire. They just like to think of themselves as Roman emperors.
Johnson specializes in delivering extreme nuttery in an extremely reasonable tone and affect. Remember his job before Jan 6 was to offer his colleagues a bland, reasoned-sounding reason to try to overthrow the electoral vote. Killing democracy with softly neutral statements.
Well we are going to test the material conditions thesis now as it seems no country in history with a world-leading economy has ever fallen into fascism. Is there even one counter-example? So, if the US democracy falls, at least we'll have solved a problem in political science.
Just saying that he's newsworthy now, and better before his confirmation hearings than after them.
Well, he's only Acting Head of the CDC so far, so please publish your stuff before his Senate confirmation hearings. Please.
Yes, but Trump barely needs MAGA anymore. He has moved on to more direct assertions of control. Trump does not have a popular populist movement. What he has is support of some elites and a paramilitary force in ICE, and the ICE recruits are not the Babbit-worshipping MAGA - it's a different crowd.
Jim O'Neill is a two-decade Thiel lackey, one of Thiel's key lieutenants. bsky.app/profile/did:...
Thiel was vengeful and hateful before the Gawker thing. His Stanford Review articles - those few that are not buried deep in Stanford archives - are toxic and horrible, just vileness projected out on the world. Maybe it's sublimated self-hatred but there's nothing to feel sorry for.
He needs to talk like JB Pritzker, though. "Dangerous trends we've been seeing" is awfully watered down for the present moment.
New acting director of CDC Jim O'Neill expressed being pro paid organ donation. "There are plenty of healthy spare kidneys walking around, unused."
Jim O'Neill has been with Thiel for since 2008, nearly 20 years. He's part of the eternal-life crowd too, ran a startup briefly that was trying to extend human lifespan.
Thiel had two cutouts that would be more acceptable - Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz have deep Evangelical credentials. But, Cruz had failed for the presidency already. JD as a recent-convert hard-right tradCath will be a tougher sell, both for the general voter and for religious-right power brokers.
But we should assume that doing a photo-op with tourists is a good thing and makes them feel better.
They are surely not happy, especially those from other states who had to leave their families and jobs - remember NG is part-time so you have to take leave from your job if you deploy. They signed up to help defend America, not to be treated as cheap janitors and landscapers in DC.
.. so there must be conflict, yet the religious right is strangely quiet right now, seeming to cede power. An expert on the religious right predicted that this is a waiting game, that if Thiel really seized power they would knife him, use his gayness against him. We shall see what happens. 2/2
Any article pointing out the network is good. The coverage can increase from there. Jan 6 had two main domestic backing groups: the fundamentalist religious right, and the techbro neo-fascists (which includes the gay MAGA network). They obviously do not share values.. 1/2
Typo, that should be Keith Rabois, not David Rabois. 3/
.. Stone being the protege of Arthur Finkelstein, who pushed homophobic and antisemitic campaigns despite being gay and Jewish. The gay MAGA network in DC now is the product of a really long history and some really dark political operators. It's not a lightweight, upbeat Style section topic. 2/
The problem is this Style section article misses the politics and the history. For example, they have a photo of Jacob Helberg without mentioning that he's the husband of longtime Peter Thiel crony David Rabois. Trump was first pushed to run by Chris Barron of GOProud, and by Roger Stone... 1/
This isn't likely about being gay per se - it's an old power network that started in the 1970s with powerful closeted gay political consultants (Arthur Finkelstein, Terry Dolan, Roger Stone) then merged with Peter Thiel's network. Gay MAGA was so important to Jan 6 they got color-coded in summaries.
This is good military-civ relations, though. It's not the soldiers' fault they're there. Better to take selfies with them than spit on them. Better that the Guard feels aligned with the tourists and residents they might someday be asked to shoot at.
In 2008, Thiel made the unqualified O'Neill the managing director of Clarium Capital, handling billions of dollars. Why? O'Neill had zero finance experience or training - at least per what's on his LinkedIn, which omits 1990-2001. He must have had some earlier link to Thiel. What was it? 2/
You know that the Seasteading / Freedom Cities stuff is Peter Thiel, right? Thiel founded the Seasteading Institute when O'Neill was still semi-respectable and working for HHS under George W Bush. He pivoted to Thiel the same year (2008), another origin story for you.. 1/
The clap-out was not for the CDC director. It was for three senior CDC officials, longtime civil servants, who resigned rather than continue. Hundreds of CDC employees took time off today to pay their respects and show their concern.
Because it's a plan. It's always been a plan. It was a plan on January 6, 2021, that didn't work out, and now it's working out.
Thiel's power grab is already upending the world. Remember yesterday's scandal, that the Trump admin has been running active measures against our NATO ally Denmark, to get Greenland to secede? That's a Thiel mad-king project too: our ambassador to DK is Peter Thiel's close friend Ken Howery. 7/
TBH seems like the entire story of this administration is filling it up with people whose only qualifications for that office is loyalty to Peter Thiel.
This account covers Peter Thiel because Thiel groomed the alt-right influencers who brought the crowds to the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021. Thiel has wanted political power for a long, long time. He didn't get it on Jan 6, but now he is taking it. People need to see the danger and fight back. 6/
Nothing in Jim O'Neill's history prepares him to safeguard our public health. What he's prepared to do is impose Peter Thiel's visions on the American people. And if Trump fades and Thiel's protege JD Vance takes the presidency, Thiel will own your government, bottom to top. 5/
The new head of CDC is not a doctor or scientist. He has no science training at all; he's a humanities major who caught Peter Thiel's eye and spent two decades fluffing his mad-king dreams. O'Neill ran Clarium Capital into the ground - it lost 90% of its value - but Peter kept him on. 4/
Jim O'Neill's not just a Thiel lieutenant, he's a true acolyte, fervently pushing all Peter's fruitcake ideas: building government-free floating cities on the ocean. Achieving eternal life. Getting kids to drop out of college. And he thinks drug safety testing is for wimps. 3/
No one's even trying to hide the Thiel takeover anymore. Jim O'Neill has been a key Thiel lieutenant for nearly 20 years. He ran the Thiel foundation, Thiel's Clarium Capital and Mithril Capital (that's the one that employed JD Vance). He's on the board of Thiel's "Seasteading Institute". 2/
The techbro takeover of the US continues: while CDC employees "clap out" their principled leaders who resigned, Trump swears in a 2-decade Peter Thiel advisor to lead CDC. Thiel's Palantir already has all your data. He controls your Vice President. Now he controls your public health too. 1/
It is an interesting question if omnipresent public video can help forestall fascism. It didn't work in Hungary, but maybe the onset was before most people had cameras in their pockets at all times.
Please realize: some people have been saying that US democracy was at risk for four years. It's not just an 8-months-ago revelation. The signs were obvious in the aftermath of Jan 6: that many elites in the US wanted to overthrow democracy and that our institutions were too weak to counter it.
But Trump wants Greenland in particular because it is an obsession of Silicon Valley techbros. It's not just that he wants to expand territory. It matters which territory he fixates on. Trump made Ken Howery, a Peter Thiel friend, the ambassador to Denmark. That choice didn't come from nowhere.
Rod Dreher moved to Hungary in 2022 because he likes life under Viktor Orban more than he likes the US. Maybe it's easier for him to shill for Putin from there, too.
Fun J6 facts: back in the day Mark Meckler founded the Tea Party Patriots with J6 rally organizer Amy Kremer. He worked with John Eastman on a plan to rewrite the US Constitution. And after Jan 6 he was, for a brief time, elevated by Rebekah Mercer to be CEO of Parler.
Paul Ingrassia, for example, was groomed in far-right activism as a student, as a Claremont fellow, twice. He did a year of law work, then went into propaganda, even wrote for the Gateway Pundit. Then Trump gave him a high-level White House appointment! That wasn't because of his law credentials.
Meant to distinguish "personal" (family) from the other way young people seem to get these kind of jobs - having been noticed in conservative student activist circles. It seems unlikely a newly graduated law student (not yet barred?) would be hired as a Senator's counsel just via sending in a CV.
Please never forget that Speaker Mike Johnson got his start in a James Dobson group. As a young law student he helped launch the Louisiana Family Forum, a state affiliate of Focus on the Family. His LFF mentor, Tony Perkins, then pushed him into politics. And Johnson also has cruelty and secrets.
Completely unsurprising, but it is good that the Danish government is calling it out in public rather than trying to handle it quietly.
He worked for Thom Thillis straight out of law school. Personal connection? Would be nice to know how that happened, and whether it's normal.
Though it's standard all over the world for would-be autocrats to run astroturfed "uprisings" with useful idiots steered by organizers. And Trump's own inner circle had run those kind of events - in Ukraine. But... not in the US, the pundits said. It can't happen here! We are special! But we aren't.
US elites told a comforting, false story: only Trump was guilty; he "instigated" his followers. Even though the followers had to be prodded and subsidized to get to DC. Though Trump's allies in Congress knew to delay the count. Though the doors at the Capitol were breached in eerie synchronicity.
This is the same dynamic that played out in 2021, when educated Americans, people in journalism, academia, and politics, refused to accept what January 6 implied: that someone had actively tried to overthrow democracy. So they told themselves it was just riled-up MAGA rubes, and looked away.
Loomer could use a longer back-story article. The existing ones are very thin, with little detail other than anti-Islam and Project-Veritas type stunts in college, then a stint at Project Veritas itself. I'd pay to read a deep dive.
Loomer?
haha, you can work out and track the guy's entire life history at the same time, we are confident in you.
FYI: the yellow flag with red stripes on the bottom is South Vietnam: the Vietnamese community was a bigger presence than the Persians, and the Chinese bigger still. A whole MAGA network radicalized through native-language social media.
There were so many pre-revolution Iranian flags at the US Capitol on Jan 6 - a big "Iranians for Trump" contingent. One of those fuckers got all the way up on the scaffolds. It's fine for them to oppose the current Iranian regime. It's not fine for them to try to overthrow US democracy.
Thank you! that is great and necessary context.
Right, but what was Aakash Singh doing between 2019 and 2024? He's wiped his LinkedIn and locked down his Facebook. Surely you of all people can find out! If someone wipes their LinkedIn, there's a reason for it, and a story in there.
Singh has also locked down his Facebook: www.facebook.com/AakashSingh For reference, below is Singh's now-deleted LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/aakash-si... This kind of scrubbing is not normal for a government employee (which is why people should have been alarmed that Aileen Cannon scrubbed hers.)
Something fascinating - Aakash Singh has been scrubbing his internet presence. It's now bizarrely hard to figure out what he was doing between 2019 (when he was Grassley's counsel) and 2024 (AUSA in Florida). Singh has deleted his LinkedIn - Legistorm has a link to his old page, but it's gone.
Aakash Singh has been in the news already for pushing for criminal prosecution of protestors. GWU law 2017, then worked 1 year for Thom Thillis, then 1 year for Chuck Grassley, to 2019. www.reuters.com/world/us/pro...
"Darkest Africa" used to be a common phrase in Britain in their colonial days, and in the US too. It stirs together dark skin, dark forests, dark morals and says they're all related: Africa as a black hole, an evil place where people are dark and "civilized" white visitors descend into darkness.
The value of basic research is not something that Lutnick can understand, apparently.
So 1) there is no conspiracy, 2) it's Congress that wanted universities to act from profit motives, 3) you save almost nothing by repealing Bayh-Dole, and 4) go ahead, repeal it! Lutnick sits here whining while his party controls the House and the Senate - just do it, my man! But he'd rather whine.
Lutnick is either a moron or criminally disingenuous; this is a made-up scandal. The university patent rules were a decision BY CONGRESS, in the bipartisan Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. Which they can repeal if they want. And, it's pennies for most universities -"basic" research isn't meant to make money.
As Trump rambles about "the Congo" in "deepest darkest Africa", realize: that term started fading with independence in 1965. The DRC has had its name since 1997. Either Trump never learned, or his mind is reverting to childhood - and he's OLD. ("Tintin in the Congo" came out in 1930, & looks it.)
History will not look kindly on the way society turned away from Jan 6 as a serious incident and decided it was "just a riot".
It was a joke.
Does Ticktin come from the same casting director who provided Stephen Miller?
Both Pritzker and Newsom are doing useful things. Yes, Pritzker is being presidential and that is badly needed and inspiring. But Newsom as troller-in-chief is also helpful right now. They are complements. Let's please not think about 2028 - let's just think about our current moment.
Yes, it is big trouble. The point is that the orders to deploy, carrying weapons, are coming from the Secretary of Defense. National Guard commanders cannot disobey that. They can only try to maintain discipline and reduce the chances of what they all must be dreading.
Please realize Pete Hegseth did not write up that guidelines sheet for the DC Guard. This sheet appears to be a (reasonable) attempt to Hegseth-proof the troops, to maintain professionalism.
The issue is, if you're the commander of a National Guard regiment ordered to stand around in urban environments and supposedly help (but not help?) with law enforcement, and the Secretary of Defense has demanded they carry loaded weapons, you want to set restrictions on how they use those weapons.
These are guidelines to keep the troops out of trouble. They're not litigating the order itself to deploy to DC.
They fired the top Judge Advocate Generals, but not the entire staff (who confusingly are also called JAGs for short). Presumably the leaders have been replaced by now, though have seen no media coverage of it. www.jurist.org/features/202...
Yes, but JD Vance is the avatar of powerful interests. Also note Venezuela's government held even when Chavez was replaced by the less-imposing Maduro. The US is an experiment in trying to impose fascism in extremely unlikely circumstances (strong economy, elderly and fading leader).
Hitler was whiny, flabby, and flatulent - he was a notorious farter. People considered him a clown and a joke in the 1920s. And yet German elites fell in line behind him.
Note that it would have to be a State Guard that is part of state law enforcement, not a National Guard that is part of the US military. But yes, it is is possible, though it's a first step to breaking up the United States, which Russia would be overjoyed by.
They're actually decent guidelines, though they might sound off. The guidelines are, no spraying bullets to intimidate. Shooting is only for defense and only in situations serious enough to require "shoot to stop" an act of violence. This sheet was written by someone responsible and careful.
The next step: Trump has signed an executive order today ordering the creation of a special unit within the US military designed to operate on US soil, against US citizens. Annotations by @rgoodlaw. This has been a goal for a long, long time. 4/ www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...
This is not a distant danger; it is very close, as National Guard troops from distant, unfamiliar, red-state towns arrive in blue-state cities. Journalists need to ask, over and over, what guidelines they carry. Former military officers need to be on TV, every day. Now is the time to speak up. 3/
Trump has talked repeatedly about using the National Guard to shoot US citizens. People need to start prepping for when that order comes. The DC National Guard are now carrying a paper with use-of-force guidelines and a big QR code for "call a JAG" (a military lawyer). But other states may not. 2/
Trump has long wanted to use the US military on citizens protesting. He said so in 2020, then replaced the SecDef who wouldn't shoot, AFTER HE LOST THE ELECTION - to prep for Jan 6. Now SecDef Pete Hegseth says the National Guard he is sending to US cities should carry weapons. Of course. 1/
* Cease fire when deadly force is no longer necessary * Must be trained and qualified on military weapons * No privately-owned weapons, ammo, expanding rounds, blanks * Use of a firearm is always deadly force. 2/2
The rules on weapons use seem sensible, and the "call a JAG" QR code is prominent. Can read all but one word. * Warning shots are NOT authorized * Weapons should, as a rule, only be used in self-defense and defense of others. * Fire only aimed shots. * Aim for center of (?mass?) * Shoot to stop 1/2
Or who helped create it.
Unpaywalled link here. Ed Martin should really stay away from Jan 6 cases if he has his own best interests at heart. archive.is/clViN
At least that's per his bio, did not confirm.
This guy you're talking to is a winemaker who lives in Europe - please don't claim that random Bluesky users are the US Democratic party.