- Smedley Butler Explains The Latest Excuse For American Intervention In Ukraine
Smedley Butler Explains The Latest Excuse For American Intervention In Ukraine
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
Senior Fellow Alex Pollock drew my attention to an important quotation by Smedley Butler:
1935 speech and later a book by Major General Smedley D. Butler (USMC), includes “… A racket is best described, I believe, something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make large fortunes…
If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destructions, they will have no time for the constructive job of building a greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war – even the munition makers.
So … I say, TO HELL WITH WAR.”
It is notable that very little has changed over the past century in terms of how regimes rationalize war. It was during the First World War that the term “merchants of death” first gained widespread use, and it was also during that war that the American regime also spoke often in terms of munitions spending as a benefit of war. It was all part of a war-propaganda machine dreamed up with Woodrow Wilson’s cadre.
Unfortunately, the propaganda still works with many. It was just two weeks ago, in fact, that the Biden Administration began explicitly trying to sell US military aid to Ukraine as a scheme to “create jobs” in the United States. The administration’s statement on the war spending is virtually identical to something out of a US propaganda mill in 1950 or 1918. We would only need to change a few of the names and places. According to Biden’s handlers:
“While this bill dispatches military hardware to Ukraine,” Biden mentioned on Tuesday, “it actually finances manufacturing within the United States in states like Arizona, where Patriot missiles are manufactured; Alabama, the home of Javelin missiles; and also Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas, which are hubs for the production of artillery shells.”
There are a multitude of problems with this statement.
For one, it completely ignores the moral questions of forcing American taxpayers to pay for Kiev to send more young men into a meat grinder that is part of a conflict it is clear Ukraine will lose.
Secondly, these weapons are not accounted for and are not audited. We don’t even know where they really end up.
Third, US involvement in the war risks involving the US in an escalating conflict that has absolutely no strategic value for normal Americans. For normal taxpayers, this is all risk and no benefit. Escalation could lead to American deaths while “victory” in Ukraine doesn’t benefit Americans at all since Ukrainian sovereignty has never contributed anything at all to American taxpayers.
Finally, there is the fact that war spending simply is not “good for the economy.” This is an old well-worn myth, but is based on nothing. Consider the process: war spending (especially spending on weapons) requires taxing productive Americans and then turning their taxpayer money into devices that will be consumed in war. Had the taxpayers been allowed to spend this money, much of that money would have been spent on things like education, capital goods, saving, and investment. Instead, that money is taxed, and then, after the bureaucrats take their cut, it is transformed into artillery shells, etc. that blow up some stuff in Ukraine for no benefit to Americans.
To imagine that this is a boon for Americans requires the most out-of-touch beltway type of thinking imaginable.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 23:40 - F-35A Becomes First Certified 5th-Gen Fighter To Carry Thermonuclear Gravity Bombs
F-35A Becomes First Certified 5th-Gen Fighter To Carry Thermonuclear Gravity Bombs
The nuclear deterrence capabilities of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are set to be significantly enhanced as the US Air Force’s newest fifth-generation fighter jet, the F-35A Lightning II, has been operationally certified to be equipped with B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bombs for the first time.
“The F-35A is the first 5th generation nuclear capable aircraft ever, and the first new platform (fighter or bomber) to achieve this status since the early 1990s. This F-35 Nuclear Certification effort culminates 10+ years of intense effort across the nuclear enterprise, which consists of 16 different government and industry stakeholders,” F-35 Joint Program Office spokesman Russ Goemaere told military blog Breaking Defense.
Goemaere said, “The F-35A achieved Nuclear Certification ahead of schedule, providing US and NATO with a critical capability that supports US extended deterrence commitments earlier than anticipated.”
In 2021, an F-35 dropped a mock nuclear bomb at Sandia National Laboratories’ Tonopah Test Range over the Nevada desert.
In late 2022, Germany signed a contract with the US to purchase dozens of F-35s capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Under NATO’s nuclear sharing program, Germany has about 20 B61 bombs.
You will find more infographics at Statista The “dual-capable” stealth fighter that can now carry both conventional and nuclear weapons is replacing fourth-generation fighters in almost all NATO states that participate in nuclear sharing. The F-35’s ability to carry modernized B61-12 nuclear bombs will beef up NATO’s regional deterrence capabilities and help deter further Russian aggression.
“This move is part of the US expanding effort in and among the US and NATO allies to counter Putin’s coercive threats to use nuclear weapons as a means to break our collective strategic resolve against Russia. Putin knows that the F-35 is more than capable of stealthily penetrating his airspace and delivering sensitive payloads,” said David Asher, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute.
It remains to be seen how Moscow will react to nuclear-capable F-35s flying near Russian borders and in the Baltic area. Russia also has a fifth-generation fighter jet, the Su-57 fighter, known by NATO as ‘Felon.’
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 23:20 - When Military Rule Supplants Democracy
When Military Rule Supplants Democracy
Authored by Robert Malone via The Brownstone Institute,
If you wish to understand how democracy ended in the United States and the European Union, please watch this interview with Tucker Carlson and Mike Benz. It is full of the most stunning revelations that I have heard in a very long time.
The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States.
“What I’m describing is military rule,” says Mike Benz.
“It’s the inversion of democracy.”
Please watch below…
Ep. 75 The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. “What I’m describing is military rule,” says Mike Benz. “It’s the inversion of democracy.” pic.twitter.com/hDTEjAf89T
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 16, 2024
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
I have also included a transcript of the above interview. In the interests of time – this is AI generated. So, there still could be little glitches – I will continue to clean up the text over the next day or two.
Note: Tucker (who I consider a friend) has given me permission to directly upload the video above and transcript below – he wrote this morning in response to my request:
Oh gosh, I hope you will. It’s important.
Honestly, it is critical that this video be seen by as many people as possible. So, please share this video interview and transcript.
Five points to consider that you might overlook;
First– the Aspen Institute planning which is described herein reminds me of the Event 201 planning for COVID.
Second– reading the comments to Tucker’s original post on “X” with this interview, I am struck by the parallels between the efforts to delegitimize me and the new efforts to delegitimize Mike Benz. People should be aware that this type of delegitimization tactic is a common response by those behind the propaganda to anyone who reveals their tactics and strategies. The core of this tactic is to cast doubt about whether the person in question is unreliable or a sort of double agent (controlled opposition).
Third– Mike Benz mostly focuses on the censorship aspect of all of this, and does not really dive deeply into the active propaganda promotion (PsyWar) aspect.
Fourth– Mike speaks of the influence mapping and natural language processing tools being deployed, but does not describe the “Behavior Matrix” tool kit involving extraction and mapping of emotion. If you want to dive in a bit further into this, I covered this latter part October 2022 in a substack essay titled “Twitter is a weapon, not a business”.
Fifth– what Mike Benz is describing is functionally a silent coup by the US Military and the Deep State. And yes, Barack Obama’s fingerprints are all over this.
Yet another “conspiracy theory” is now being validated.
Transcript of the video:
Tucker Carlson:
The defining fact of the United States is freedom of speech. To the extent this country is actually exceptional, it’s because we have the first amendment in the Bill of Rights. We have freedom of conscience. We can say what we really think.
There’s no hate speech exception to that just because you hate what somebody else thinks. You cannot force that person to be quiet because we’re citizens, not slaves. But that right, that foundational right that makes this country what it is, that right from which all of the rights flow is going away at high speed in the face of censorship. Now, modern censorship, there’s no resemblance to previous censorship regimes in previous countries and previous eras. Our censorship is affected on the basis of fights against disinformation and malformation. And the key thing to know about this is that they’re everywhere. And of course, this censorship has no reference at all to whether what you’re saying is true or not.
In other words, you can say something that is factually accurate and consistent with your own conscience. And in previous versions of America, you had an absolute right to say those things. but now – because someone doesn’t like them or because they’re inconvenient to whatever plan the people in power have, they can be denounced as disinformation and you could be stripped of your right to express them either in person or online. In fact, expressing these things can become a criminal act and is it’s important to know, by the way, that this is not just the private sector doing this.
These efforts are being directed by the US government, which you pay for and at least theoretically owned. It’s your government, but they’re stripping your rights at very high speed. Most people understand this intuitively, but they don’t know how it happens. How does censorship happen? What are the mechanics of it?
Mike Benz is, we can say with some confidence, the expert in the world on how this happens. Mike Benz had the cyber portfolio at the State Department. He’s now executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, and we’re going to have a conversation with him about a very specific kind of censorship. By the way, we can’t recommend strongly enough, if you want to know how this happens, Mike Benz is the man to read.
But today we just want to talk about a specific kind of censorship and that censorship that emanates from the fabled military industrial complex, from our defense industry and the foreign policy establishment in Washington. That’s significant now because we’re on the cusp of a global war, and so you can expect censorship to increase dramatically. And so with that, here is Mike Benz, executive director of Foundation for Freedom online. Mike, thanks so much for joining us and I just can’t overstate to our audience how exhaustive and comprehensive your knowledge is on this topic. It’s almost unbelievable. And so if you could just walk us through how the foreign policy establishment and defense contractors and DOD and just the whole cluster, the constellation of defense related publicly funded institutions, stripped from us,
Mike Benz:
Our freedom of speech. Sure. One of the easiest ways to actually start the story is really with the story of internet freedom and it switched from internet freedom to internet censorship because free speech on the internet was an instrument of statecraft almost from the outset of the privatization of the internet in 1991. We quickly discovered through the efforts of the Defense Department, the State Department and our intelligence services, that people were using the internet to congregate on blogs and forums. And at this point, free speech was championed more than anybody by the Pentagon, the State Department, and our sort of CIA cutout NGO blob architecture as a way to support dissident groups around the world in order to help them overthrow authoritarian governments as they were sort of build essentially the internet free speech allowed kind of insta regime change operations to be able to facilitate the foreign policy establishments State Department agenda.
Google is a great example of this. Google began as a DARPA grant by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford PhDs, and they got their funding as part of a joint CIA NSA program to chart how “birds of a feather flock together online” through search engine aggregation. And then one year later they launched Google and then became a military contractor. Quickly thereafter, they got Google Maps by purchasing a CIA satellite software essentially, and the ability to use free speech on the internet as a way to circumvent state control over media over in places like Central Asia and all around the world, was seen as a way to be able to do what used to be done out of CIA station houses or out of embassies or consulates in a way that was totally turbocharged. And all of the internet free speech technology was initially created by our national security state – VPNs, virtual private networks to hide your IP address, tour the dark web, to be able to buy and sell goods anonymously, end-to-end encrypted chats.
All of these things were created initially as DARPA projects or as joint CIA NSA projects to be able to help intelligence backed groups, to overthrow governments that were causing a problem to the Clinton administration or the Bush administration or the Obama administration. And this plan worked magically from about 1991 until about 2014 when there began to be an about face on internet freedom and its utility.
Now, the high watermark of the sort of internet free speech moment was the Arab Spring in 2011, 2012 when you had this one by one – all of the adversary governments of the Obama Administration: Egypt, Tunisia, all began to be toppled in Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions. And you had the State Department working very closely with the social media companies to be able to keep social media online during those periods. There was a famous phone call from Google’s Jared Cohen to Twitter to not do their scheduled maintenance so that the preferred opposition group in Iran would be able to use Twitter to win that election.
So free speech was an instrument of statecraft from the national security state to begin with. All of that architecture, all the NGOs, the relationships between the tech companies and the national security state had been long established for freedom. In 2014, after the coup in Ukraine, there was an unexpected counter coup where Crimea and the Donbas broke away and they broke away with essentially a military backstop that NATO was highly unprepared for at the time. They had one last Hail Mary chance, which was the Crimea annexation vote in 2014. And when the hearts and minds of the people of Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation, that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of NATO – as they saw it. The fundamental nature of war changed at that moment. And NATO at that point declared something that they first called the Gerasimov doctrine, which was named after this Russian military, a general who they claimed made a speech that the fundamental nature of war has changed.
(Gerasimov doctrine is the idea that) you don’t need to win military skirmishes to take over central and eastern Europe. All you need to do is control the media and the social media ecosystem because that’s what controls elections. And if you simply get the right administration into power, they control the military. So it’s infinitely cheaper than conducting a military war to simply conduct an organized political influence operation over social media and legacy media. An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into a organized political warfare outfit, essentially infrastructure that was created initially stationed in Germany and in Central and eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones, basically to create the ability to have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda and then to censor domestic, right-wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.
So you had the systematic targeting by our state department, by our intelligence community, by the Pentagon of groups like Germany’s AFD, the alternative for Deutsche Land there and for groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Now, when Brexit happened in 2016, that was this crisis moment where suddenly they didn’t have to worry just about central and eastern Europe anymore. It was coming westward, this idea of Russian control over hearts and minds. And so Brexit was June, 2016. The very next month at the Warsaw Conference, NATO formally amended its charter to expressly commit to hybrid warfare as this new NATO capacity. So they went from basically 70 years of tanks to this explicit capacity building for censoring tweets if they were deemed to be Russian proxies. And again, it’s not just Russian propaganda this, these were now Brexit groups or groups like Mateo Salvini in Italy or in Greece or in Germany or in Spain with the Vox Party.
And now at the time NATO was publishing white papers saying that the biggest threat NATO faces is not actually a military invasion from Russia. It’s losing domestic elections across Europe to all these right-wing populace groups who, because they were mostly working class movements, were campaigning on cheap Russian energy at a time when the US was pressuring this energy diversification policy. And so they made the argument after Brexit, now the entire rules-based international order would collapse unless the military took control over media because Brexit would give rise to Frexit in France with marine Lapin just Brexit in Spain with a Vox party to Italy exit in Italy, to Grexit in Germany, to Grexit in Greece, the EU would come apart, so NATO would be killed without a single bullet being fired. And then not only that, now that NATO’s gone, now there’s no enforcement arm for the International Monetary fund, the IMF or the World Bank. So now the financial stakeholders who depend on the battering ram of the national security state would basically be helpless against governments around the world. So from their perspective, if the military did not begin to censor the internet, all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after World War II would collapse. So you can imagine the reaction,
Tucker Carlson:
Wait, ask
Mike Benz:
Later. Donald Trump won the 2016 election. So
Tucker Carlson:
Well, you just told a remarkable story that I’ve never heard anybody explain as lucidly and crisply as you just did. But did anyone at NATO or anyone at the State Department pause for a moment and say, wait a second, we’ve just identified our new enemy as democracy within our own countries. I think that’s what you’re saying. They feared that the people, the citizens of their own countries would get their way, and they went to war against that.
Mike Benz:
Yes. Now there’s a rich history of this dating back to the Cold War. The Cold War in Europe was essentially a similar struggle for hearts and minds of people, especially in central and Eastern Europe in these sort of Soviet buffer zones. And starting in 1948, the national security state was really established. Then you had the 1947 Act, which established the Central Intelligence Agency. You had this world order that had been created with all these international institutions, and you had the 1948 UN Declaration on human rights, which forbid the territorial acquisition by military force. So you can no longer run a traditional military occupation government in the way that we could in 1898, for example, when we took the Philippines, everything had to be done through a sort of political legitimization process whereby there’s some ratification from the hearts and minds of people within the country.
Now, often that involves simply puppet politicians who are groomed as emerging leaders by our State Department. But the battle for hearts and minds had been something that we had been giving ourselves a long moral license leash, if you will, since 1948. One of the godfathers of the CIA was George Kennan. So, 12 days after we rigged the Italian election in 1948 by stuffing ballot boxes and working with the mob, we published a memo called the Inauguration of organized political warfare where Kennan said, “listen, it’s a mean old world out there. We at the CIA just rigged the Italian election. We had to do it because if the Communist won, maybe there’d never be another election in Italy again, but it’s really effective, guys. We need a department of dirty tricks to be able to do this around the world. And this is essentially a new social contract we’re constructing with the American people because this is not the way we’ve conducted diplomacy before, but we are now forbidden from using the war department in 1948.”
They also renamed the war department to the Defense Department. So again, as part of this diplomatic onslaught for political control, rather than it looking like it’s overt military control, but essentially what ended up happening there is we created this foreign domestic firewall. We said that we have a department of dirty tricks to be able to rig elections, to be able to control media, to be able to meddle in the internal affairs of every other plot of dirt in the country.
But this sort of sacred dirt in which the American homeland sits, they are not allowed to operate there. The State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA are all expressly forbidden from operating on US soil. Of course, this is so far from the case, it’s not even funny, but that’s because of a number of laundering tricks that they’ve developed over 70 years of doing this.
But essentially there was no moral quandary at first with respect to the creation of the censorship industry. When it started out in Germany and in Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia and in Sweden and Finland, there began to be a more diplomatic debate about it after Brexit, and then it became full throttle when Trump was elected. And what little resistance there was was washed over by the rise in saturation of Russiagate, which basically allowed them to not have to deal with the moral ambiguities of censoring your own people.
Because if Trump was a Russian asset, you no longer really had a traditional free speech issue. It was a national security issue. It was only after Russiagate died in July, 2019 when Robert Mueller basically choked on the stand for three hours and revealed he had absolutely nothing. After two and a half years of investigation that the foreign to domestic switcheroo took place where they took all of this censorship architecture, spanning DHS, the FBI, the CIA, the DOD, the DOJ, and then the thousands of government funded NGO and private sector mercenary firms were all basically transited from a foreign predicate, a Russian disinformation predicate to a democracy predicate by saying that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes from the Russians, it’s actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself.
And so by that, they were able to launder the entire democracy promotion regime change toolkit just in time for the 2020 election.
Tucker Carlson:
I mean, it’s almost beyond belief that this has happened. I mean, my own father worked for the US government in this business in the information war against the Soviet Union and was a big part of that. And the idea that any of those tools would be turned against American citizens by the US government, I think I want to think was absolutely unthinkable in say 1988. And you’re saying that there really hasn’t been anyone who’s raised objections and it’s absolutely turned inward to manipulate and rig our own elections as we would in say Latvia.
Mike Benz:
Yeah. Well, as soon as the democracy predicate was established, you had this professional class of professional regime change artists and operatives that is the same people who argued that we need to bring democracy to Yugoslavia, and that’s the predicate for getting rid of Milošević or any other country around the world where we basically overthrow governments in order to preserve democracy. Well, if the democracy threat is homegrown now, then that becomes, then suddenly these people all have new jobs moving on the US side, and I can go through a million examples of that. But one thing on what you just mentioned, which is that from their perspective, they just weren’t ready for the internet. 2016 was really the first time that social media had reached such maturity that it began to eclipse legacy media. I mean, this was a long time coming. I think folks saw this building from 2006 through 2016.
Internet 1.0 didn’t even have social media from 1991 to 2004, there was no social media at all. 2004, Facebook came out 2005, Twitter, 2006, YouTube 2007, the smartphone. And in that initial period of social media, nobody was getting subscriber ships at the level where they actually competed with legacy news media. But over the course of being so initially even these dissonant voices within the us, even though they may have been loud in moments, they never reached 30 million followers. They never reached a billion impressions a year type thing. As a uncensored mature ecosystem allowed citizen journalists and independent voices to be able to outcompete legacy news media. This induced a massive crisis both in our military and in our state department in intelligence services. I’ll give you a great example of this in 2019 at meeting of the German Marshall Fund, which is an institution that goes back to the US basically, I don’t want to say bribe, but essentially the soft power economic soft power projection in Europe as part of the reconstruction of European governments after World War ii, to be able to essentially pay them with Marshall Fund dollars and then in return, they basically were under our thumb in terms of how they reconstructed.
But the German Marshall Fund held a meeting in 2019. They held a million of these, frankly, but this was when a four star general got up on the panel and posed the question, what happens to the US military? What happens to the national security state when the New York Times is reduced to a medium sized Facebook page? And he posed this thought experiment as an example of we’ve had these gatekeepers, we’ve had these bumper cars on democracy in the form a century old relationship with legacy media institutions. I mean, our mainstream media is not in any shape or form even from its outset, independent from the national security state, from the state Department, from the war department, you had the initial, all of the initial broadcast news companies, NBC, ABC and CBS were all created by Office of War Information Veterans from the War department’s effort in World War ii.
You had these Operation Mockingbird relationships from the 1950s through the 1970s. Those continued through the use of the National Endowment for Democracy and the privatization of intelligence capacities in the 1980s under Reagan. There’s all sorts of CIA reading room memos you can read even on cia.gov about those continued media relations throughout the 1990s. And so you always had this backdoor relationship between the Washington Post, the New York Times, and all of the major broadcast media corporations. By the way, Rupert Murdoch and Fox are part of this as well. Rupert Murdoch was actually part of the National Endowment for Democracy Coalition in 1983 when it was as a way to do CIA operations in an aboveboard way after the Democrats were so ticked off at the CIA for manipulating student movements in the 1970s. But essentially there was no CIA intermediary to random citizen journalist accounts. There was no Pentagon backstop.
You couldn’t get a story killed. You couldn’t have this favors for favors relationship. You couldn’t promise access to some random person with 700,000 followers who’s got an opinion on Syrian gas. And so this induced, and this was not a problem for the initial period of social media from 2006 to 2014 because there were never dissident groups that were big enough to be able to have a mature enough ecosystem on their own. And all of the victories on social media had gone in the way of where the money was, which was from the State Department and the Defense Department and the intelligence services. But then as that maturity happened, you now had this situation after the 2016 election where they said, okay, now the entire international order might come undone. 70 years of unified foreign policy from Truman until Trump are now about to be broken.
And we need the same analog control systems. We had to be able to put bumper cars on bad stories or bad political movements through legacy media relationships and contacts we now need to establish and consolidate within the social media companies. And the initial predicate for that was Russiagate. But then after Russiagate died and they used a simple democracy promotion predicate, then it gave rise to this multi-billion dollar censorship industry that joins together the military industrial complex, the government, the private sector, the civil society organizations, and then this vast cobweb of media allies and professional fact checker groups that serve as this sort of sentinel class that surveys every word on the internet.
Tucker Carlson:
Thank you again for this almost unbelievable explanation of why this is happening. Can you give us an example of how it happens and just pick one among, I know countless examples of how the national security state lies to the population, censors the truth in real life.
Mike Benz:
Yeah, so we have this state department outfit called the Global Engagement Center, which was created by a guy named Rick Stengel who described himself as Obama’s propaganda in chief. He was the undersecretary for public affairs essentially, which is the liaison office role between the state department and the mainstream media. So this is basically the exact nexus where government talking points about war or about diplomacy or statecraft get synchronized with mainstream media.
Tucker Carlson:
May I add something to that as someone I know – Rick Stengel. He was at one point a journalist and Rick Stengel has made public arguments against the First Amendment and against Free Speech.
Mike Benz:
Yeah, he wrote a whole book on it and he published an op-Ed in 2019. He wrote a whole book on it and he made the argument that we just went over here that essentially the Constitution was not prepared for the internet and we need to get rid of the First Amendment accordingly. And he described himself as a free speech absolutist when he was the managing editor of Time Magazine. And even when he was in the State Department under Obama, he started something called the Global Engagement Center, which was the first government censorship operation within the federal government, but it was foreign facing, so it was okay. Now, at the time, they used the homegrown ISIS predicate threat for this. And so it was very hard to argue against the idea of the State Department having this formal coordination partnership with every major tech platform in the US because at the time there were these ISIS attacks that were, and we were told that ISIS was recruiting on Twitter and Facebook.
And so the Global Engagement Center was established essentially to be a state department entanglement with the social media companies to basically put bumper cars on their ability to platform accounts. And one of the things they did is they created a new technology, which it’s called Natural Language processing. It is a artificial intelligence machine learning ability to create meaning out of words in order to map everything that everyone says on the internet and create this vast topography of how communities are organized online, who the major influences are, what they’re talking about, what narratives are emerging or trending, and to be able to create this sort of network graph in order to know who to target and how information moves through an ecosystem. And so they began plotting the language, the prefixes, the suffixes, the popular terms, the slogans that ISIS folks were talking about on Twitter.
When Trump won the election in 2016, everyone who worked at the State Department was expecting these promotions to the White House National Security Council under Hillary Clinton, who I should remind viewers was also Secretary of State under Obama, actually ran the State Department. But these folks were all expecting promotions on November 8th, 2016 and were unceremoniously put out of jobs by a guy who was a 20 to one underdog according to the New York Times the day of the election. And when that happened, these State Department folks took their special set of skills, coercing governments for sanctions. The State Department led the effort to sanction Russia over the Crimea annexation. In 2014, these State Department diplomats did an international roadshow to pressure European governments to pass censorship laws to censor the right-wing populous groups in Europe and as a boomerang impact to censor populace groups who were affiliated in the us.
So you had folks who went from the state department directly, for example, to the Atlanta Council, which was this major facilitator between government to government censorship. The Atlanta Council is a group that is one of Biden’s biggest political backers. They bill themselves as NATO’s Think Tank. So they represent the political census of NATO. And in many respects, when NATO has civil society actions that they want to be coordinated to synchronize with military action or region, the Atlantic Council essentially is deployed to consensus build and make that political action happen within a region of interest to nato.
Now, the Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its board. A lot of people don’t even know that seven CIA directors are still alive, let alone all concentrated on the board of a single organization that’s kind of the heavyweight in the censorship industry. They get annual funding from the Department of Defense, the State Department, and CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy.
The Atlantic Council in January, 2017 moved immediately to pressure European governments to pass censorship laws to create a transatlantic flank tank on free speech in exactly the way that Rick Stengel essentially called for to have us mimic European censorship laws. One of the ways they did this was by getting Germany to pass something called Nets DG in August, 2017, which was essentially kicked off the era of automated censorship in the us. What Nets DG required was, unless social media platforms wanted to pay a $54 million fine for each instance of speech, each post left up on their platform for more than 48 hours that had been identified as hate speech, they would be fined basically into bankruptcy when you aggregate 54 million over tens of thousands of posts per day. And the safe haven around that was if they deployed artificial intelligence based censorship technologies, which had been again created by DARPA to take on ISIS to be able to scan and ban speech automatically.
And this gave rise to what I call these weapons of mass deletion. These are essentially the ability to sensor tens of millions of posts with just a few lines of code. And the way this is done is by aggregating basically the field of censorship science fuses together two disparate groups of study, if you will. There’s the sort of political and social scientists who are the sort of thought leaders of what should be censored, and then there are the sort of quants, if you will. These are the programmers, the computational data scientists, computational Linguistics University.
There’s over 60 universities now who get federal government grants to do the censorship work and the censorship preparation work where what they do is they create these code books of the language that people use the same way they did for isis. They did this, for example, with COVID. They created these COVID lexicons of what dissident groups were saying about mandates, about masks, about vaccines, about high profile individuals like Tony Fauci or Peter Daszak or any of these protected VIPs and individuals whose reputations had to be protected online.
And they created these code books, they broke things down into narratives. The Atlanta Council, for example, was a part of this government funded consortium, something called the Virality Project, which mapped 66 different narratives that dissidents we’re talking about around covid, everything from COVID origins to vaccine efficacy. And then they broke down these 66 claims into all the different factual sub claims. And then they plugged these into these essentially machine learning models to be able to have a constant world heat map of what everybody was saying about covid. And whenever something started trend that was bad for what the Pentagon wanted or was bad for what Tony Fauci wanted, they were able to take down tens of millions of posts. They did this in the 2020 election with mail-in ballots. It was the same. Wait,
Tucker Carlson:
There’s so much here and it’s so shocking. So you’re saying the Pentagon, our Pentagon, the US Department of Defense censored Americans during the 2020 election cycle?
Mike Benz:
Yes, they did this through the, so the two most censored events in human history, I would argue to date are the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, and I’ll explain how I arrived there.
So the 2020 election was determined by mail-in ballots, and I’m not weighing into the substance of whether mail-in ballots were or were not a legitimate or safe and reliable form of voting. That’s a completely independent topic from my perspective.
Then the censorship issue one, but the censorship of mail-in ballots is really one of the most extraordinary stories in our American history. I would argue what happened was is you had this plot within the Department of Homeland Security. Now this gets back to what we were talking about with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. You had this group within the Atlanta Council and the Foreign Policy Establishment, which began arguing in 2017 for the need for a permanent domestic censorship government office to serve as a quarterback for what they called a whole of society counter misinformation, counter disinformation alliance.
That just means censorship. To counter “miss-dis-info”. But their whole society model explicitly proposed that we need every single asset within society to be mobilized in a whole of society effort to stop misinformation online. It was that much of an existential threat to democracy, but they fixated in 2017 that it had to be centered within the government because only the government would have the clout and the coercive threat powers and the perceived authority to be able to tell the social media companies what to do to be able to summon a government funded NGO Swarm to create that media surround sound to be able to arm an AstroTurf army of fact checkers and to be able to liaise and connect all these different censorship industry actors into a cohesive unified hole. And the Atlantic Council initially proposed with this blueprint called Forward defense. “It’s not offense, it’s Forward Defense” guys.
They initially proposed that running this out of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center because they had so many assets there who were so effective at censorship under Rick Stengel, under the Obama administration. But they said, oh, we are not going to be able to get away with that. We don’t really have a national security predicate and it’s supposed to be foreign facing. We can’t really use that hook unless we have a sort of national security one. Then they contemplated parking it, the CIA, and they said, well, actually there’s two reasons we can’t do that. The is a foreign facing organization and we can’t really establish a counterintelligence threat to bring it home domestically. Also, we’re going to need essentially tens of thousands of people involved in this operation spanning this whole society model, and you can’t really run a clandestine operation that way. So they said, okay, well what about the FBI?
They said, well, the FBI would be great, it’s domestic, but the problem is is the FBI is supposed to be the intelligence arm of the Justice Department. And what we’re dealing with here are not acts of law breaking, it’s basically support for Trump. Or if a left winging popularist had risen to power like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbin, I have no doubt they would’ve done in the UK. They would’ve done the same thing to him there. They targeted Jeremy Corbin and other left-wing populist NATO skeptical groups in Europe, but in the US it was all Trump.
And so essentially what they said is, well, the only other domestic intelligence equity we have in the US besides the FBI is the DHS. So we are going to essentially take the CIA’s power to rig and bribe foreign media organizations, which is the power they’ve had since the day they were born in 1947. And we’re going to combine that with the power with the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI by putting it at DHS. So DHS was basically deputized. It was empowered through this obscure little cybersecurity agency to have the combined powers that the CIA has abroad with the jurisdiction of the FBI at home. And the way they did this, how did a cyber, an obscure little cybersecurity agency get this power was they did a funny little series of switcheroos. So this little thing called CISA, they didn’t call it the Disinformation Governance Board. They didn’t call it the Censorship Agency. They gave it an obscure little name that no one would notice called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) who his founder said, we care about security so much, it’s in our name twice. Everybody sort of closed their eyes and pretended that’s what it was. CISA was created by Active Congress in 2018 because of the perceived threat that Russia had hacked the 2016 election.
And so we needed the cybersecurity power to be able to deal with that. And essentially on the heels of a CIA memo on January 6th, 2017 and a same day DHS executive order on January 6th, 2017, arguing that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and a DHS mandate saying that elections are now critical infrastructure, you had this new power within DHS to say that cybersecurity attacks on elections are now our purview. And then they did two cute things. One they said said, miss dis and Malformation online are a form of cybersecurity attack. They are a cyber attack because they are happening online. And they said, well, actually Russian disinformation is we’re actually protecting democracy and elections. We don’t need a Russian predicate after Russiagate died. So just like that, you had this cybersecurity agency be able to legally make the argument that your tweets about mail-in ballots if you undermine public faith and confidence in them as a legitimate form of voting was now you were now conducting a cyber attack on US critical infrastructure articulating misinformation on Twitter and just like that.
Tucker Carlson:
Wait- in other words, complaining about election fraud is the same as taking down our power grid.
Mike Benz:
Yes, you could literally be on your toilet seat at nine 30 on a Thursday night and tweet, I think that mail-in ballots are illegitimate. And you were essentially then caught up in the crosshairs of the Department of Homeland Security classifying you as conducting a cyber attack on US critical infrastructure because you were doing misinformation online in the cyber realm. And misinformation is a cyber attack on democracy when it undermines public faith and confidence in our democratic elections and our democratic institutions, they would end up going far beyond that. They would actually define democratic institutions as being another thing that was a cybersecurity attack to undermine and lo and behold, the mainstream media is considered a democratic institution that would come later. What ended up happening was in the advance of the 2020 election, starting in April of 2020, although this goes back before you had this essentially never Trump NeoCon Republican DHS working with essentially NATO on the national security side and essentially the DNC, if you will, to use DHS as the launching point for a government coordinated mass censorship campaign spanning every single social media platform on earth in order to preens the ability to dispute the legitimacy of mail-in ballots.
And here’s how they did this. They aggregated four different institutions. Stanford University, the University of Washington, a company called Graphica and the Atlantic Council. Now all four of these institutions, the centers within them were essentially Pentagon cutouts you had at the Stanford Air Observatory. It was actually run by Michael McFaul, if you know Michael McFaul. He was the US ambassador to Russia under the Obama administration, and he personally authored a seven step playbook for how to successfully orchestrate a color revolution. And part of that involved maintaining total control over media and social media juicing up the civil society outfits, calling elections illegitimate in order to. Now, mind you, all of these people were professional Russia, Gators and professional election delegitimizes in 2016, and then I’ll get that in a sec. So Stanford, the Stanford Observatory under Michael McFaul was run by Alex Stamos, who was formerly a Facebook executive who coordinated with ODNI and with respect to Russiagate taking down Russian propaganda at Facebook.
So this is another liaison essentially to the national security state. And under Alex Stamos at Sanford Observatory was Renee Diresta, who started her career in the CIA and wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian disinformation, and there’s a lot more there that I’ll get to another time. But the next institution was the University of Washington, which is essentially the Bill Gates University in Seattle who is headed by Kate Starboard, who is basically three generations of military brass who got our PhD in crisis informatics, essentially doing social media surveillance for the Pentagon and getting DARPA funding and working essentially with the national security state, then repurposed to take on mail-in ballots. The third firm Graphica got $7 million in Pentagon grants and got their start as part of the Pentagon’s Minerva initiative. The Minerva Initiative is the Psychological Warfare Research Center of the Pentagon. This group was doing social media spying and narrative mapping for the Pentagon until the 2016 election happened, and then were repurposed into a partnership with the Department of Homeland Security to censor 22 million Trump tweets, pro-Trump tweets about mail-in ballots.
And then the fourth institution, as I mentioned, was the Atlantic Council who’s got seven CIA directors on the board, so one after another. It is exactly what Ben Rhodes described during the Obama era as the blob, the Foreign Policy Establishment, it’s the Defense Department, the State Department or the CIA every single time. And of course this was because they were threatened by Trump’s foreign policy, and so while much of the censorship looks like it’s coming domestically, it’s actually by our foreign facing department of Dirty tricks, color revolution blob, who were professional government toppers who were then basically descended on the 2020 election.
Now they did this, they explicitly said the head of this election integrity partnership on tape and my foundation clipped them, and it’s been played before Congress and it’s a part of the Missouri Biden lawsuit now, but they explicitly said on tape that they were set up to do what the government was banned from doing itself, and then they articulated a multi-step framework in order to coerce all the tech companies to take censorship actions.
They said on tape that the tech companies would not have done it but for the pressure, which involved using threats of government force because they were the deputized arm of the government. They had a formal partnership with the DHS. They were able to use DHS’ proprietary domestic disinformation switchboard to immediately talk to top brass at all the tech companies for takedowns, and they bragged on tape about how they got the tech companies to all systematically adopt a new terms of service speech violation ban called delegitimization, which meant any tweet, any YouTube video, any Facebook post, any TikTok video, any discord posts, any Twitch video, anything on the internet that undermine public faith and confidence in the use of mail-in ballots or early voting drop boxes or ballot tabulation issues on election day was a prima fascia terms of service violation policy under this new delegitimization policy that they only adopted because of pass through government pressure from the election integrity partnership, which they bragged about on tape, including the grid that they used to do this, and simultaneously invoking threats of government breaking them up or government stopping doing favors for the tech companies unless they did this as well as inducing crisis PR by working with their media allies.
And they said DHS could not do that themselves. And so they set up this basically constellation of State Department, Pentagon and IC networks to run this censorship campaign, which by their own math had 22 million tweets on Twitter alone, and mind you, they just on 15 platforms, this is hundreds of millions of posts which were all scanned and banned or throttled so that they could not be amplified or they exist in a sort of limited state purgatory or had these frictions affixed to them in the form of fact-checking labels where you couldn’t actually click through the thing or you had to, it was an inconvenience to be able to share it. Now, they did this seven months before the election because at the time they were worried about the perceived legitimacy of a Biden victory in the case of a so-called Red Mirage Blue Shift event.
They knew the only way that Biden would win mathematically was through the disproportionate Democrat use of mail-in ballots. They knew there would be a crisis because it was going to look extremely weird if Trump looked like he won by seven states and then three days later it comes out actually the election switch, I mean that would put the election crisis of the Bush Gore election on a level of steroids that the National Security state said, well, the public will not be prepared for. So what we need to do is we need to in advance, we need to preens the ability to even question legitimacy.
Tucker Carlson:
Out, wait, wait, may I ask you to pause right there? Key influences by, so what you’re saying is what you’re suggesting is they knew the outcome of the election seven months before it was held.
Mike Benz:
It looks very bad.
Tucker Carlson:
Yes, Mike. It does look very bad
Mike Benz:
And especially when you combine this with the fact that this is right on the heels of the impeachment. The Pentagon led and the CIA led impeachment. It was Eric ? from the CIA, and it was Vindman from the Pentagon who led the impeachment of Trump in late 2019 over an alleged phone call around withholding Ukraine aid. This same network, which came straight out of the Pentagon hybrid warfare military censorship network, created after the first Ukraine crisis in 2014 were the lead architects of the Ukraine impeachment in 2019, and then essentially came back on steroids as part of the 2020 election censorship operation. But from their perspective, I mean it certainly looks like the perfect crime. These were the people. DHS at the time had actually federalized much of the National Election Administration through this January 6th, 2017 executive order from outgoing Obama. DHS had Jed Johnson, which essentially wrapped all 50 states up into a formal DHS partnership. So DHS was simultaneously in charge of the administration of the election in many respects, and the censorship of anyone who challenged the administration of the election. This is like putting essentially the defendant of a trial as the judge and jury of the trial. It was
Tucker Carlson:
Very, but you’re not describing democracy. I mean, you’re describing a country in which democracy is impossible.
Mike Benz:
What I’m essentially describing is military rule. I mean, what’s happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself. Democracy sort draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is ruled by consent of the people being ruled. That is, it’s not really being ruled by an overlord because the government is actually just our will expressed by our consent with who we vote for. The whole push after the 2016 election and after Brexit and after a couple of other social media run elections that went the wrong way from what the State Department wanted, like the 2016 Philippines election, was to completely invert everything that we described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the internet. And what they essentially said is, we need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions and who are the democratic institutions?
Oh, it’s the military, it’s NATO, it’s the IMF and the World Bank. It’s the mainstream media, it is the NGOs, and of course these NGOs are largely state department funded or IC funded. It’s essentially all of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism that declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. Because if you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you’re left with is essentially democracy is just the consensus building architecture within the Democrat institutions themselves. And from their perspective, that takes a lot of work. I mean, the amount of work these people do. I mean, for example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is one of these big coordinating mechanisms for the oil and gas industry in a region for the finance and the JP Morgans and the BlackRocks in a region for the NGOs in the region, for the media, in the region, all of these need to reach a consensus, and that process takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of work and a lot of negotiation from their perspective.
That’s democracy. Democracy is getting the NGOs to agree with BlackRock, to agree with the Wall Street Journal, to agree with the community and activist groups who are onboarded with respect to a particular initiative that is the difficult vote building process from their perspective.
At the end of the day, a bunch of populous groups decide that they like a truck driver who’s popular on TikTok more than the carefully constructed consensus of the NATO military brass. Well then from their perspective, that is now an attack on democracy, and this is what this whole branding effort was. And of course, democracy again has that magic regime change predicate where democracy is our magic watchword to be able to overthrow governments from the ground up in a sort of color revolution style whole of society effort to topple a democratically elected government from the inside, for example, as we did in Ukraine, Victor Jankovich was democratically elected by the Ukrainian people like him or hate him.
I’m not even issuing an opinion, but the fact is we color revolution him out of office. We January 6th out of office, actually, to be frank, I mean with respect to the, you had a state department funded right sector thugs and 5 billion worth of civil society money pumped into this to overthrow democratically elected government in the name of democracy, and they took that special set of skills home and now it’s here, perhaps potentially to stay. And this has fundamentally changed the nature of American governance because of the threat of one small voice becoming popular on social media.
Tucker Carlson:
May I ask you a question? So into that group of institutions that you say now define democracy, the NGOs foreign policy establishment, et cetera, you included the mainstream media. Now in 2021, the NSA broke into my private text apps and read them and then leaked them to the New York Times against me. That just happened again to me last week, and I’m wondering how common that is for the Intel agencies to work with so-called mainstream media like the New York Times to hurt their opponents.
Mike Benz:
Well, that is the function of these interstitial government funded non-governmental organizations and think tanks like for example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is NATO’s think tank, but other groups like the Aspen Institute, which draws the lion’s share of its funding from the State department and other government agencies. The Aspen Institute was busted doing the same thing with the Hunter Biden laptop censorship. You had this strange situation where the FBI had advanced knowledge of the pending publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and then magically the Aspen Institute, which is run by essentially former CIA, former NSA, former FBI, and then a bunch of civil society organizations all hold a mass stakeholder censorship simulation, a three day conference, this came out and yo Roth was there. This is a big part of the Twitter file leaks, and it’s been mentioned in multiple congressional investigations.
But somehow the Aspen Institute, which is basically an addendum of the National Security state, got the exact same information that the National Security State spied on journalists and political figures to obtain, and not only leaked it, but then basically did a joint coordinated censorship simulator in September, two months before the election in order just like with the censorship of mail-in ballots to be in ready position to screens anyone online amplifying, wait a second, a news story that had not even broken yet.
Tucker Carlson:
The Aspen Institute, which is by the way, I’ve spent my life in Washington. It’s kind a, I mean Walter Isaacson formerly of Time Magazine ran it, former president of CNNI had no idea it was part of the national security state. I had no idea its funding came from the US government. This is the first time I’ve ever heard that. But given, assuming what you’re saying is true, it’s a little weird or starnge that Walter Isaacson left Aspens to write a biography of Elon Musk?
Mike Benz:
No? Yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t read that book. From what I’ve heard from people, it’s a relatively fair treatment. I just total speculation. But I suspect that Walter Isaacson has struggled with this issue and may not even firmly fall in one particular place in the sense that Walter Isaacson did a series of interviews of Rick Gel actually with the Atlantic Council and in other settings where he interviewed Rick Gel specifically on the issue of the need to get rid of the First Amendment and the threat that free speech on social media poses to democracy. Now, at the time, I was very concerned, this was between 2017 and 2019 when he did these Rick Stangle interviews. I was very concerned because Isaacson expressed what seemed to me to be a highly sympathetic view about the Rick Stengel perspective on killing the First Amendment. Now, he didn’t formally endorse that position, but it left me very skittish about Isaacson.
But what I should say is at the time, I don’t think very many people, in fact, I know virtually nobody in the country had any idea how deep the rabbit hole went when it came to the construction of the censorship industry and how deep the tentacles had grown within the military and the national security state in order to buoy and consolidate it. Much of that frankly did not even come to public light until even last year. Frankly, some of that was galvanized by Elon Musk’s acquisition and the Twitter files and the Republican turnover in the house that allowed these multiple investigations, the lawsuits like Missouri v Biden and the discovery process there and multiple other things like the Disinformation governance board, who, by the way, the interim head of that, the head of that Nina Janowitz got her start in the censorship industry from this exact same clandestine intelligence community censorship network created after the 2014 Crimea situation.
Nina Janowitz, when her name came up in 2022 as part of the disinformation governance board, I almost fell out of my chair because I had been tracking Nina’s network for almost five years at that point when her name came up as part of the UK inner cluster cell of a busted clandestine operation to censor of the internet called the Integrity Initiative, which was created by the UK Foreign Office and was backed by NATO’s Political Affairs Unit in order to carry out this thing that we talked about at the beginning of this dialogue, the NATO sort of psychological inoculation and the ability to kill, so-called Russian propaganda or rising political groups who wanted to maintain energy relations with Russia at a time when the US was trying to kill the Nord Stream and other pipeline relations. Well,
Well, Nina Janowitz was a part of this outfit, and then who was the head of it after Nina Janowitz went down, it was Michael Chertoff and Michael Chertoff was running the Aspen Institute Cyber Group. And then the Aspen Institute then goes on to be the censorship simulator for the Hunter Biden laptop story. And then two years later, Chertoff is then the head of the disinformation governance board after Nina is forced to step down.
Tucker Carlson:
Tucker Carlson: Of course, Michael Chertoff was the chairman of the largest military contractor in Europe, BAE military. So it’s all connected. You’ve blown my mind so many times in this conversation that I’m going to need a nap directly after it’s done. So I’ve just got two more questions for you, one short one, a little longer short. One is for people who’ve made it this far an hour in and want to know more about this topic. And by the way, I hope you’ll come back whenever you have the time to explore different threads of this story. But for people who want to do research on their own, how can your research on this be found on the internet?
Mike Benz:
Sure. So our foundation is foundation for freedom online.com. We publish all manner of reports on every aspect of the censorship industry from what we talked about with the role of the military industrial complex and the national security state to what the universities are doing to, I sometimes refer to as digital MK Ultra. There’s just the field of basically the science of censorship and the funding of these psychological manipulation methods in order to nudge people into different belief systems as they did with covid, as they did with energy. And every sensitive policy issue is what they essentially had an ambition for. But so my foundationforfreedomonline.com website is one way. The other way is just on X. My handle is at @MikeBenzCyber. I’m very active there and publish a lot of long form video and written content on all this. I think it’s one of the most important issues in the world today.
Tucker Carlson:
So it certainly is. And so that leads directly and seamlessly to my final question, which is about X. And I’m not just saying this because I post content there, but I think objectively it’s the last big platform that’s free or sort of free or more free. You post there too, but we’re at the very beginning of an election year with a couple of different wars unfolding simultaneously in 2024. So do you expect that that platform can stay free for the duration of this year?
Mike Benz:
It’s under an extraordinary amount of pressure, and that pressure is going to continue to mount as the election approaches. Elon Musk is a very unique individual, and he has a unique buffer, perhaps when it comes to the national security state because the national security state is actually quite reliant on Elon Musk properties, whether that’s for the electrical, the Green Revolution when it comes to Tesla and the battery technology there. When it comes to SpaceX, the State Department is hugely dependent on SpaceX because of its unbelievable sort of pioneering and saturating presence in the field of low earth orbit satellites that are basically how our telecom system runs to things like starlink. There are dependencies that the National Security state has on Elon Musk. I’m not sure he’d have as much room to negotiate if he had become the world’s richest man selling at a lemonade stand, and if the national security state goes too hard on him by invoking something like CFIUS to sort of nationalize some of these properties.
I think the shock wave that it would send to the international investor community would be irrecoverable at a time when we’re engaged in great power competition. So they’re trying to sort of induce, I think a sort of corporate regime change through a series of things involving a sort of death by a thousand paper cuts. I think there’s seven or eight different Justice Department or SEC or FTC investigations into Elon Musk properties that all started after his acquisition of X. But then what they’re trying to do right now is what I call the Transatlantic Flank Attack 2.0. We talked in this dialogue about how the censorship industry really got its start when a bunch of State Department exiles who were expecting promotions took their special set of skills in coercing European countries to pass sanctions on themselves, to cut off their own leg off to spite themselves in order to pass sanctions on Russia.
They ran back that same playbook with doing a roadshow for censorship instead for sanctions. We are now witnessing Transatlantic Flank attack 2.0, if you will, which is because they have lost a lot of their federal government powers to do this same censorship operation they had been doing from 2018 to 2022. In part because the house has totally turned on them, in part because of the media, in part because Missouri v Biden, which won a slam dunk case, actually banning government censorship at the trial court and appellate court levels. It is now before the Supreme Court, they’ve now moved into two strategies.
One of them is state level censorship laws. California just passed a new law, which the censorship industry totally drove from start to finish around, they call it platform accountability and transparency, which is basically forcing Elon Musk to give over the kind of narrative mapping data that these CIA conduits and Pentagon cutouts were using to create these weapons of mass deletion, these abilities to just censor everything at scale because they had all the internal platform data. Elon Musk took that away.
They’re using state laws like this new California law to crack that open. But the major threat right now is the threat from Europe with something called the EU Digital Services Act, which was cooked up in tandem with folks like NewsGuard, which has a board of Michael Hayden, head of the CIA NSA and a Fourstar General. Rick Stengel is on that board from the state department’s propaganda office. Tom Ridge is on that board from the Department of Homeland Security. Oh, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen – he was the general secretary of NATO under the Obama administration. So you have NATO, the CIA, the NSA four star General DHS, and the State Department working with the EU to craft the censorship laws that now are the largest existential threat to X other than potentially advertiser boycotts. Because there is now disinformation is now banned as a matter of law in the EU.
The EU is a bigger market for X than the us. There’s only 300 million in the USA. But there is 450 million people in Europe. X is now forced to comply with this brand new law that just got ratified this year where they either need to forfeit 6% of their global annual revenue to the EU to maintain operations there, or put in place essentially the kind of CIA bumper cars, if you will, that I’ve been describing over the course of this in order to have a internal mechanism to sensor anything that the eu, which is just a proxy for NATO deems to be disinformation. And you can bet with 65 elections around the globe this year, you can predict every single time what they’re going to define disinformation as. So that’s the main fight right now is dealing with the transatlantic flank attack from Europe.
Tucker Carlson:
This is just one of the most remarkable stories I’ve ever heard, and I’m grateful to you for bringing it to us. Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, and I hope we see you again in
Mike Benz:
Thanks, Tucker.
Tucker Carlson:
Free speech is bigger than any one person or any one organization. Societies are defined by what they will not permit. What we’re watching is the total inversion of virtue.
* * *
Republished from the author’s Substack
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 23:00 - GM Defense's New Infantry Squad Vehicle Passes Grueling Sand Dune Trials In UAE
GM Defense’s New Infantry Squad Vehicle Passes Grueling Sand Dune Trials In UAE
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Armed Forces completed evaluation trials of the Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) by General Motors Defense, built on the chassis of a Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 midsize truck.
GM Defense’s ISV successfully completed all trials that the UAE Armed Forces could throw at the offroad utility vehicle for elite military special operations units in the Middle Eastern country. The trial included traveling nearly 1,250 miles across highways, dunes, soft sand tracks, and rocky walls while carrying maximum payload capacities.
In addition to mobility trials, the ISV completed the maintenance trial, which included two days of field repair testing and maintenance.
“This was GM Defense’s first time sending a vehicle to UAE Summer Trials, and our successful completion is a testament to the strength of our ISV and to the expertise and dedication of our team,” said Steve duMont, GM Defense president.
DuMont continued: “Through completion of all phases, we’ve demonstrated that we can successfully leverage the advanced technologies of our parent company, General Motors, to deliver a highly capable off-road vehicle that can meet the needs of defense and government customers in the UAE and throughout the region. Our Summer Trial achievements are a key step forward in our planned growth in the region as we seek to offer the ISV and its variants to this important customer base.”
In 2020, the United States Army selected the ISV to enhance its operational capabilities. The ISV incorporates 90% commercial off-the-shelf parts, is designed to carry nine infantrymen. The vehicle’s adaptability for air transportability allows it to be deployed through military aircraft, including C-130 to UH-60 Blackhawk.
The ISV is the big brother to the ultra-light Polaris MRZR that Special Forces have used for years. Occasionally, the MRZR will be listed on the auction website Gov Planet for civilians to purchase.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 22:40 - Faulty US Aid Drop Kills At Least 5 Palestinians In Gaza City
Faulty US Aid Drop Kills At Least 5 Palestinians In Gaza City
At least five Palestinians were killed and one other wounded after a faulty aid drop in Gaza City on Friday. The casualties occurred following a botched attempt to drop humanitarian assistance from a plane, which ended up landing in a residential area in Sheikh Radwan, northwest of Gaza City, according to Al-Jazeera.
Videos captured by local journalists showed over a dozen packages dropped from a plane falling at a great speed near the al-Fayrouz Towers area.
A military plane drops humanitarian aid over northern Gaza on March 7, via AFP. The Palestinian media office in Gaza confirmed that five people had been killed, and criticized the use of air drops to deliver aid. “These operations are useless and not the best way to bring in aid, and we demand the opening of land crossings to bring in thousands of tons of aid immediately and urgently,” it said.
“Dropping aid in this way takes on a showy and propaganda character rather than a humanitarian [one],” the media office added. “We warned previously that they pose a death threat to the lives of citizens in the Gaza Strip, and that is what happened.”
An eyewitness told Al-Jazeera on Friday: “People were waiting for the drops when they noticed they were coming in fast. So a group of people took cover in a construction site.”
“One of the packages fell atop the site, causing it to collapse, killing and wounding people inside. I rushed to help the people inside when I realized my cousin was among them. He is now dead.”
Airdropping aid is used when all other alternatives fail, and when a population desperately needs life-saving aid while it is cut off from the world.
So far, Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and France have coordinated with Israel to airdrop aid in different areas of the blockaded Gaza Strip. The US on Sunday carried out its first humanitarian aid airdrop in Gaza with more than 30,000 meals parachuted in by three military planes. The operation was reportedly carried out jointly with Jordan’s air force.
Watch: some of the crates sound like bombs when they hit the ground at high speed…
هذا ما خلفه الإسقاط الجوي على مدينة غزة ، ش&يد وعدد من الإصابات نتيجة إسقاط فاشل على منازل المواطنين شمال مخيم الشاطئ.. pic.twitter.com/NUbkv05mtx
— إسماعيل الغول – Ismail Alghoul (@ismail_gh2) March 8, 2024
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Palestinians have said that airdropped aid quantities are too small in comparison to the needs of a starving population in Gaza.
“It is pointless,” Ahmad Mansour, a Palestinian in the south of Gaza, told Middle East Eye earlier this week. “A lot of the aid ended up in the sea or areas controlled by the Israeli army. You have got thousands of people running towards a few parcels of aid. They are playing games with us.”
“I cannot understand why the world cannot pressure Israel to allow humanitarian aid trucks in,” Mansour continued. “Why can humanitarian aid workers not be protected to distribute the aid fairly? Is the new motto: ‘We will eat and get medicine only if we are lucky enough to catch something falling from the sky’?”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 22:20 - 'We Got To Reign Her In': Behind The Scenes Of Nuland's Early Retirement
‘We Got To Reign Her In’: Behind The Scenes Of Nuland’s Early Retirement
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern in a new interview has speculated over the reasons behind Victoria Nuland stepping down from her high-ranking position as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the number three top official in the State Department.
Her retirement was announced by her boss Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday. But the question is why now when the administration is attempting to stay the course and present a strong continued stance on Ukraine, also as Biden is still seeking to get tens of billions in defense aid through Republicans in the House.
US State Department image While there have been rumors that maybe she could be in poor or declining health, McGovern has told Russia’s Sputnik that the notoriously hawkish Nuland was a liability at a moment NATO and Russia are inching closer to direct nuclear-armed confrontation.
“My best guess here is that the CIA and the Defense Department and the NSA got this message around saying, ‘look, Victoria’s got her own agenda here,’” said McGovern.
The former CIA official continued to speculate: “‘The president doesn’t really want to strike these ammo depots in Russia or knock down the [Crimean] Bridge. So we got to rein her in, I guess it’s time for her to go to early retirement.’”
Another theory, though not necessarily contradictory to the above, has been advanced by professor of national security at Bowie State University Dr. Matthew Crosston.
He laid out what “a staunch anti-Putinist Nuland was and how fervently she wanted to continue to utilize Ukraine as a platform in which to continue to weaken and/or slight Russia on the global stage — and perhaps even up the ante in that conflict with her support of sending ballistic missiles into Ukraine.” But she also knows the Ukrainian side is losing.
She may have seen the writing on the wall as Ukraine forces are in retreat, and wanted to bail before potential total defeat:
“She undoubtedly understood that if American support lessons or wanes, Ukraine loses, period,” Crosston pointed out. “Perhaps she did not want to be in the Administration that would be responsible for that outcome.”
But both McGovern and Crosston would agree that with Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (in this capacity she basically ran all of US foreign policy in Europe), ceasefire talks between Kiev and Moscow remained an extremely distant prospect or even an impossibility.
“One thing is certain: as long as Nuland remained in that chair, there was literally no chance such talk could even be theorized. Now it can,” Crosston concluded.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald also weighed in on Nuland stepping down in an interview with The Hill. Greenwald describes the “singular monstrousness of Victoria Nuland and her bipartisan, blood-stained, ghoulish career“…
Nuland’s temporary replacement for under secretary upon her retirement has been announced as career diplomat John Bass, a former ambassador to Afghanistan. He is currently in the position of the undersecretary of state for management. He oversaw Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and so it is somewhat ironic that he’ll also oversee Ukraine policy at this critical juncture where Kiev is clearly against the ropes.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 22:00 - "A Pork Fest Of Epic Proportions": Congress Passes Spending Package To Avert Shutdown
“A Pork Fest Of Epic Proportions”: Congress Passes Spending Package To Avert Shutdown
By Jacob Burg of The Epoch Times
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) makes a statement alongside (L–R) Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), and Mike McCaul (R-Texas) outside the White House on Jan. 17, 2024. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images) The Senate passed six government funding bills on March 8 to avoid an impending shutdown deadline that was poised to activate at midnight later that night.
Senators approved the funding package 75–22 early in the evening on March 8 after hours of debate. Democrats pushed for a faster vote, while Republicans proposed several amendments to the funding package that all inevitably failed.
After the House of Representatives passed its measure on March 6, only the Senate was left to pass its funding bills before they were all sent to President Joe Biden to be signed into law. In addition to the March 8 deadline, there is another looming shutdown deadline on March 22.
The bills passed by Democrats and Republicans, including a second set of bills ahead of the March 22 deadline, will get Congress one step closer to funding vital government programs for the remainder of the fiscal year.
The spending package funds programs including the departments of Veterans Affairs, Energy, Agriculture, Transportation, Commerce, Justice, Interior, military construction, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Housing and Urban Development, and other federal programs.
The package was touted by both Republicans and Democrats.
The Senate bills would also provide critical support for veteran medical care, hiring new air traffic controllers, and scientific research programs for the United States’ economic competitiveness with China.
“This is an outcome both parties can be proud of because we have found a way to put the needs of our country first,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the Senate floor on March 8.
“Today’s bipartisan agreement gives us momentum and space to finish the remaining appropriation bills by March 22. Of course, it’s going to take both sides working together to keep that momentum alive,” he added.
“To folks who worry that divided government means nothing ever gets done, this bipartisan package says otherwise.”
House Bill
House Republicans under Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) leadership passed the House funding package on March 7 with bipartisan support from Democrats. The final vote was 339–85, which included two Democrats and 83 Republicans voting in opposition to the spending bills.
That 1,050-page package of bills from the House funds the same list of departments and government programs as the Senate version.
However, it also reduces funding for several programs, which Mr. Johnson referred to as “sharp cuts to agencies and programs critical to President Biden’s agenda” in a news release on March 3.
Those include 10 percent spending reductions for the Environmental Protection Agency, a 6 percent reduction for the FBI, and a 7 percent reduction for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
The bills also include provisions intended to restrain agencies the GOP claims are weaponized against Republicans.
“This legislation forbids the Department of Justice from targeting parents exercising their right to free speech before school boards, while it blocks the Biden administration from stripping Second Amendment rights from veterans,” Mr. Johnson said on March 3.
Since many Republicans wanted to do away with funding the government via large omnibus bills, the House Freedom Caucus pushed other GOP members to oppose the package.
“The House Freedom Caucus opposes the $1.65 trillion omnibus spending bill, which will be decided in two halves, the first being brought to the floor this week under suspension of the rules,” the group said in a March 5 statement.
“Even in the face of $34 trillion in national debt, the omnibus will bust the bipartisan spending caps signed into law less than a year ago and is loaded with hundreds of pages of earmarks worth billions.”
Despite the opposition from some Republicans, the passage of these funding bills marks a rare show of bipartisanship in Congress during a contentious primary and general election season.
Republicans Voice Concerns
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), while voicing support for the spending package, also chided Democrats for seeming poised to skip voting on the amendments.
“I don’t know why we’re having such a hard time figuring out how we deal with amendments around here. It’s just not that hard,” she said.
“I don’t think that there’s anything out there that should scare any of us about taking an amendment … But the fact that we cannot figure out how to get to a time agreement because the Democrats don’t want to entertain amendments, or they want to direct what amendments we have,” Ms. Murkowski added.
“I think we can do a little bit better.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was critical of the spending package, calling it a “pork fest of epic proportions.”
“It also is sort of the grease that eases in billions and trillions of other dollars because you get people to buy into the total package by giving them a little bit of pork for their town, a little bit of pork for their donors,” he added.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), instead, warned her Republican colleagues that delaying the vote would hurt the veterans who need their government benefits the most.
“I want to offer my colleagues a warning. If we do not act at midnight tonight, we will have a partial government shutdown,” she said.
“Do we really want a veteran who has bravely and loyally served his country and is now trying to file a claim for benefits to find that the Veterans Benefits Administration’s doors are closed to him or her? Is that what we want to have happen?”
Continue reading at the Epoch Times.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 21:49 - DOD Report Shows Proposal To Look Into Reverse-Engineered UAP Craft
DOD Report Shows Proposal To Look Into Reverse-Engineered UAP Craft
Authored by Matt McGregor via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Although the reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial craft has remained within the realm of conspiracy theories, a new report shows that the Department of Defense (DOD) had been asked to consider investigating the issue.
David Grusch arrives to testify during a hearing titled ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security Public Safety and Government Transparency,’ on Capitol Hill, on July 26, 2023. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images) A study by the U.S. Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO)—first reported by Politico—examined unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), commonly referred to as UFOs, from 1945 until the present. The study was released on Friday.
The report found “no evidence that any [U.S. government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology,” according to The Washington Post.
According to the report, these alleged alien craft could be written off as “ordinary objects and phenomena, and the result of misidentification.”
Although the report largely debunked UAP sightings, it found that a program titled “Kona Blue” was proposed to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the 2010s, which would have examined the benefits of reverse-engineering recovered extraterrestrial craft.
According to the report, the proposal was rejected by DHS “for lacking merit” because there was no craft recovered.
“It is critical to note that no extraterrestrial craft or bodies were ever collected, this material was only assumed to exist by Kona Blue advocates and its anticipated contract performers,” the report stated.
Kona Blue was first declassified in AARO’s report.
According to AARO’s acting director, Tim Phillips, the program was never approved because no department “possessed any material or information.”
‘Misrepresentations’
Mr. Phillips later attributed the sightings to misrepresentations of popular culture and classified military programs.
“These are rational people making observations and just relating to what they know,” Mr. Phillips said. “We were able to go back to the program owners in that range and ask, ‘by the way, what were we flying during this week?’ My God, I would have thought it would have been a UAP myself when I actually saw the picture of it.”
The report contradicts much of what David Grusch, a former intelligence officer turned whistleblower, said throughout 2023 when discussing what the U.S. government knew about extraterrestrial technology.
He alleged that covert factions within the U.S. government possessed alien craft and bodies.Mr. Grusch, who has been openly critical of AARO, spoke about the UAP Disclosure Act, legislation that was being considered in Congress that could allow for greater transparency regarding what the government knows about UAPs.
A still from GO FAST, an official U.S. government video of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), taken in 2015. (U.S. Navy) According to Mr. Grusch, the legislation was modeled after the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which directed the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to establish the Assassination Records Review Board to collect all records related to the assassination of President Kennedy.
Though the board never met the expectations of those questioning the official narrative, Mr. Grusch said this bill had more “teeth” to “force the issue.”
In November 2023, Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), and Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) held a press conference in which they vehemently criticized the stalling of the legislation. Some pointed out their issues with the legislation itself, which allows for the collection of UAP records to be disclosed to the public 25 years after the date of record creation unless the president deems such disclosure a threat to national security.
Most recently, an unclassified report from the Pentagon’s inspector general claimed that the DOD had no “coordinated approach” to investigate the UAP issue. Due to this lack of coordination, the report stated that it left the United States open to external military threats, which compromises national security.
Maj. Jesse Marcel from the Roswell Army Air Field with debris found 75 miles northwest of Roswell, N.M., in June 1947. (United States Air Force/AFP/Getty Images) Reversed-Engineered Technology
There have been multiple testimonies of government officials claiming that recovered UAP craft have been reverse-engineered for technological advancement.
In 1997, Lt. Col. Philip Corso made a striking claim in his memoir “The Day After Roswell.” He alleged that during his tenure as a member of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s National Security Council and as head of the foreign technological desk at the U.S. Army’s Research and Development Department, he led the Army’s reverse-engineering project. This project allegedly utilized recovered technology from the 1947 Roswell crash and disseminated the information to major corporate firms.
Using the provided information, these firms manufactured “lasers, integrated circuitry, fiber-optics networks, accelerated particle-beam devices, and even the Kevlar material in bulletproof vests,” Lt. Col. Corso wrote.
The Roswell incident was initially reported as a confirmed recovered flying saucer by the U.S. Army Air Forces before the story was quickly retracted and reported as a fallen weather balloon.
Caden Pearson contributed to this report.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 21:40 - New York AG Letitia James Sued For Overriding Transgender Sports Ban
New York AG Letitia James Sued For Overriding Transgender Sports Ban
New York Attorney General Letitia James has been sued by a Nassau County executive who has accused her of unconstitutional discrimination for trying to override the county’s decision to block biologically mmale transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
New York Attorney General Letitia James speaks during a press conference at the Office of the Attorney General in New York on Feb. 16, 2024. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images) The lawsuit was filed by Nassau County official Bruce Blakeman, who said on X that he filed the lawsuit “to protect women’s sports and ensure a safe environment for women.”
“Bullying of women and girls will not be tolerated!” he added, in response to James’ cease and desist letter and threat to use legal action to force the county to allow trans athletes to compete.
In a March 5 complaint filed in the Eastern District of New York, Blakeman seeks to block James from overriding his executive order imposing the ban at county-run facilities. Blakeman argues that her C&D violates the constitutional rights of girls and women, while accusing her of “unconstitutionally discriminating against individuals on the basis of gender” in regards to sporting events, The Epoch Times reports.
“There is a movement for biological males to bully their way into competing in sports or leagues or teams that identify themselves or advertise themselves as girls’ or female or women’s teams or leagues,” Blakeman said during a Feb. 22 press conference.
“We find that unacceptable. It’s a form of bullying,” he added.
In response, James demanded that the executive order be revoked – citing a New York law which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex or “gender identity or expression.”
More via the Epoch Times;
A spokesperson for Ms. James’ office told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that it believes Mr. Blakeman’s executive order is “transphobic and discriminatory” and violates New York state law.
“This is not up for debate: the executive order is illegal, and it will not stand in New York,” the spokesperson said.
‘Undeniable’ Biological Differences
The Nassau County executive order mandates that sports organizations applying for permits in Nassau County facilities must designate teams according to one of three categories: males, men, or boys; females, women, or girls; coed or mixed, including males and females. The criterion for designation is a team member’s biological sex.
The new rule expressly prohibits the Nassau County Department of Parks, Recreation and Museums from issuing permits for the use of county facilities for competitions or sports events in which biological males participate in female-designated teams and leagues.
The department may, however, issue permits for events in which women compete in men’s leagues or events.
Samantha Goetz, a deputy county attorney who was recently elected as a District 18 legislator, spoke at the Feb. 22 press conference in support of the executive order.
“This is a matter that concerns the integrity, the fairness, and the safety of women’s sports,” she said. “Our biological differences are undeniable.”
Ms. Goetz, who played varsity basketball, said the executive order is also about access to opportunity like sports scholarships and, ultimately, it’s about “protecting our female athletes.”
Mr. Blakeman argued at the press conference that the problem chiefly concerns female-identifying males taking part in women’s sports. He said allowing this poses a safety risk due to female competitors due to men’s generally superior strength and size, while also depriving women of opportunities.
“What we are saying here today with our executive order is that if a league or team identifies themselves or advertises themselves to be a girls’ or women’s league or team, then biological males should not be competing in those leagues,” he said.
Mr. Blakeman added that he hoped the move would not be seen as discriminatory. He pointedly stated that transgender athletes are welcome to compete in the co-ed or mixed league or in one that corresponds to their sex but not necessarily their preferred gender identity.
However, Ms. James didn’t see it that way.
‘Blatantly Illegal’
Ms. James claimed that the executive order violates the rights of men who identify as women, and forces sports teams and leagues to either discriminate against them or find another place to play.
“The law is perfectly clear: you cannot discriminate against a person because of their gender identity or expression. We have no room for hate or bigotry in New York,” Ms. James said in a statement.
“This executive order is transphobic and blatantly illegal,” she continued, adding that if the county doesn’t revoke the order, she’ll take further legal action.
The issue of men competing in women’s sports has become a highly charged issue, with a number of states adopting laws banning transgender-identifying athletes from participating in school sports.
While some of these transgender sports bans face legal challenges, an overwhelming majority of Americans say that athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their “birth gender.”
World Athletics, the international governing body for the sport of athletics, recently banned transgender women from competing in women’s events at international competitions.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 21:20 - House Democrats Press Musk’s SpaceX On Claims Russian Forces Have Starlink Systems
House Democrats Press Musk’s SpaceX On Claims Russian Forces Have Starlink Systems
Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
House Democrats are pressing SpaceX and its CEO, Elon Musk, for answers on allegations coming from Ukrainian intelligence officials that Russian forces are using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service in their ongoing war with Ukraine.
The antenna of the Starlink satellite-based broadband system is seen in the snow in Bakhmut, Ukraine, on Feb. 16, 2023. (Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images) On Wednesday, March 6, House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) sent a letter to SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell, calling for her to address how Russian forces may have obtained SpaceX terminals.
Starlink terminals connect to SpaceX’s constellation of thousands of satellites operating in low Earth orbit. SpaceX began supplying thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine after Russian invasion forces entered the country in February 2022, helping keep Ukraine online even as Russian attacks degraded their existing telecommunications and internet infrastructure.
Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) first raised concerns about Russian forces using the Starlink service on Feb. 11. GUR spokesman Andriy Yusov stated at the time that Ukrainian intelligence officials had intercepted radio transmissions in which Russian soldiers described widespread use of the satellite internet service around the contested Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.
“This is starting to become systemic,” Mr. Yusov said of Russia’s alleged use of the Starlink service.
Mr. Musk has denied the allegations, stating, “To the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia.”
But Mr. Raskin and Mr. Garcia are continuing to press the question. The two lawmakers noted a report last month by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which said “Russia routinely relies on evasive or deceptive tactics such as the use of third-party intermediaries or transshipment points” to evade U.S. export controls against the country.
The two lawmakers noted Mr. Musk’s denial, but reiterated Mr. Yusov’s characterization of Russia’s Starlink usage as “systemic.”
“We are concerned that you may not have appropriate guardrails and policies in place to ensure your technology is neither acquired directly or indirectly, nor used illegally by Russia,” their letter to Ms. Shotwell reads.
The Democrats called on SpaceX to reveal how many reports or complaints it has received alleging Russian use of the Starlink service, as well as how many of those complaints the company investigated. The lawmakers also pressed SpaceX to explain its review process for such complaints, detail its safeguards against illicit acquisitions of Starlink terminals, what measures SpaceX advises to take when it determines an actor has illicitly acquired a Starlink terminal, and what work SpaceX has taken on its own and with the U.S. federal government to prevent such illicit acquisition and use of Starlink services. The lawmakers called on Ms. Shotwell to provide SpaceX’s response by March 20.
How Russia May Have Obtained Starlink Terminals
Not cited in the Democrats’ March 6 letter is a Feb. 13 blog post in which Ukraine’s GUR service posits intermediaries in Arab countries may be facilitating the transfers of Starlink terminals to Russian forces. That blog post describes an audio recording in which a Russian “occupier” is quoted as saying “the Arabs bring everything: wires, Wi-Fi, router… .” According to the GUR blog post, this same Russian individual reportedly went on to say the cost to obtain a Starlink device is 200,000 Russian Rubles (about $2,200).
While the GUR shared an audio recording in their Feb. 11 blog post, they did not provide the audio recording described in the Feb. 13 blog post, which might provide further clarity about how Starlink terminals may be ending up in Russian hands.
NTD News reached out to Mr. Raskin and Mr. Garcia’s offices, seeking more details about what evidence is guiding their SpaceX probe. Neither lawmaker’s office responded by press time.
More than two years on, the war between Russia and Ukraine has seen territory repeatedly change hands. Defense materials, from combat vehicles to weapons systems and items like Starlink terminals, may also see changes in ownership throughout the course of the fighting.
Among NTD News’ list of questions for Mr. Garcia was whether he and Mr. Raskin had ruled out the possibility that Russian forces had acquired Starlink terminals from defeated Ukrainian troops.
NTD News also reached out to SpaceX for comment about the possibility of Starlink terminals being captured on the battlefield, as well as evidence it may have of illicit transfers of these terminals through intermediaries. Likewise, SpaceX did not respond by press time.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 21:00 - Gold Star Dad Arrested After Heckling Biden Over Son's Death In Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal
Gold Star Dad Arrested After Heckling Biden Over Son’s Death In Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal
President Biden was momentarily distracted from delivery of his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, as the father of a Marine killed during the mishandled withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan yelled from the gallery at the top of his lungs, imploring the audience to remember the bloody bombing that took his son’s life.
Steven Nikoui shouts at President Biden from the gallery at Thursday’s State of the Union Address (Andrew Harnik/AP via Yahoo News) As Biden was at a part of the speech where he was daring to claim that Americans are “safer today than when he took office,” 51-year-old Steven Nikoui bellowed “REMEMBER ABBEY GATE! US MARINES!” He was referring to a gate outside Karzai International Airport where a suicide bomber killed 11 Marines, a Navy corpsman and an Army soldier on August 26, 2021 as the airport was mobbed by people trying to flee the country. Among the dead: Nikoui’s son, Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, a 22-year-old Californian.
In a 2022 interview with Fox News, Nikoui condemned “the carelessness of this administration” and said Biden “hasn’t taken any accountability.” He also called for the resignation of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley. His wife, Shana Chappell, said, “For some reason, [administration officials and generals] want to put the blame on everyone but themselves, but it is actually their fault all of this happened.”
President Biden was heckled by a Gold Star father during his #SOTU address
Steve Nikoui, the father of Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui — 1 of the 13 U.S. service members who was killed during Biden’s botched Afghan exit on August 2021 — yelled “Abbey Gate, Abbey Gate. United… pic.twitter.com/XyeqMwnd3n
— Mona Salama (@ByMonaSalama) March 8, 2024
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
After shouting at Biden, Nikoui was cooperative as US Capitol Police officers asked him to leave and escorted him from the chamber. He was handcuffed and arrested on a misdemeanor District of Columbia charge. “Disrupting the Congress and demonstrating in Congressional buildings is illegal,” said Capitol Police in a statement. “This is a routine charge on Capitol Hill. People who illegally demonstrate/disrupt Congress typically are released after they pay a $50 fine, so the misdemeanor charge is resolved without going to court.”
Marine Lance Cpl Kareem Nikoui outside Karzai International Airport Nikoui was at the address as a guest of Republican Florida Rep. Brian Mast, whose two legs and a finger were amputated after he stepped on an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Valley as he served as a US Army bomb technician supporting a team of Army Rangers.
It’s not clear if he knew of Nikoui’s intention to disrupt Biden’s speech. Earlier in the day, Mast tweeted a photo of himself with Nikoui and wrote, “Joe Biden may try to turn the page on Afghanistan after his incompetence cost American lives, but NOT ON MY WATCH.”
Steve Nikoui, the father of fallen Marine LCpl. Kareem Nikoui, was my guest to #SOTU2024.
He was arrested because he cried out to @JoeBiden to remember his son.
Joe Biden has never honored those killed at the Abby Gate and still hails the catastrophic withdrawal as a success! pic.twitter.com/m8Y0sUPLY6
— Rep. Brian Mast (@RepBrianMast) March 8, 2024
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 20:55 - Biden Campaign Chair Says "No Surprise" The President Is Losing Key Voters
Biden Campaign Chair Says “No Surprise” The President Is Losing Key Voters
The Biden campaign has admitted to a “shift” among the electorate which has made it no “surprise” that the president is losing key voters to former President Donald Trump, based on a recent New York Times/Siena poll.
The poll, conducted Feb. 25 – Feb. 28, found that just one out of four registered voters believes “the country is moving in the right direction.” It also showed that Trump has been breaking the Democrat stronghold among women, which are now evenly split.
Speaking with CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer, campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu first questioned the accuracy of the poll, before seemingly explaining it away as “tectonic shifts.”
“Well, first of all, I‘m not sure that‘s accurate, but assuming that some of those things are occurring, it‘s not really a big surprise. As you know, because you‘re an expert in political science, there are tectonic shifts going on amongst the electorates.“
Robot mode: Engage
He then rattled off a talking point – suggesting that “women in this country understand that Trump has declared war on them by appointing three Supreme Court justices that have reversed Roe versus Wade, that has resulted in Alabama outlawing in vitro fertilization.”
“Or in Ohio, police officers [having] gone into a woman‘s house to look into a toilet because they’ve now criminalized miscarriages. So now you see a huge swing, as should be expected, of women basically saying, ‘Why is the government in the business of my reproductive health,'” he continued.
Watch (via the Daily Caller):
According to Landrieu, Biden will “fight for every vote,” adding “The president’s going to talk about his record, how when he came into office, what he had to deal with, what it is that he put together in a bipartisan way — really, that has been second to none — and then he‘s going to talk about the future. But the bigger point that Joe Biden wants to tell America is that America is worth fighting for, that democracy [is at] risk, and that when we do things together we can do big things.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 20:40 - Boiling Hard Tap Water Removes Up To 90% Of Microplastics: Study
Boiling Hard Tap Water Removes Up To 90% Of Microplastics: Study
Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Boiling tap water is good for more than just killing certain harmful pathogens. It can also destroy contaminants such as microplastics and chemicals, making drinking water safer to drink.
(Jenn Segal) A new research letter published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters indicates that boiling tap water for just five minutes could reduce the amount of microplastics by up to 90 percent. Researchers from Guangzhou Medical University and the Center for Environmental Microplastics Studies in China recommend boiling water in nonplastic electric kettles on gas stoves to remove impurities such as polystyrene, polyethylene, and polypropylene.
According to the researchers, boiling water has been used since ancient times as a purification method in some Asian countries. “This simple boiling-water strategy can ‘decontaminate’ [nano- and microplastics] from household tap water and has the potential for harmlessly alleviating human intake of [nano- and microplastics] through water consumption,” they wrote.
Harder Water Captures More Microplastics
Water of a certain alkalinity and hardness typically produces incrustants—insoluble mineral remnants like calcium carbonate—upon boiling. For the study, the researchers hypothesized that calcium carbonate encounters nanoplastics as it crystallizes in hot water. The calcium carbonate then encapsulates the nanoplastics as it becomes the flaky crust you sometimes see at the bottom of your tea kettle.
The study showed that boiling hard tap water containing 300 milligrams per liter (mg/L-1) of calcium carbonate reduced nano- and microplastics by nearly 90 percent, while water containing 80 mg/L-1 reduced particles by 84 percent. In soft water samples containing less than 60 mg/L-1 of calcium carbonate, boiling still reduced plastics by over 25 percent.
The Problem With Millions of Tons of Plastic
Because of our heavy reliance on plastic, nanoplastics and microplastics are common in groundwater and surface water around the globe. Microplastics are truly everywhere, having been detected as far south as Antarctica and north as the Arctic. These insidious particles have even been detected at the peak of Mt. Everest and down in the Mariana Trench. In fact, plastic comprises the largest portion of marine garbage; according to a 2020 study published in Science of the Total Environment, more than 8 million tons of plastic entered the ocean in 2017. That number represented over 33 times more plastic than the amount that had entered the ocean in 2015, indicating a disturbingly worsening problem.
As plastic disintegrates, microscopic pieces are released into the environment. Microplastics are typically less than 5 millimeters in size but can break down into even smaller pieces called nanoplastics. Nanoplastics are nearly impossible to see at 1 micrometer in size. The micro and nano pieces have been found in water, air, soil, food, and table salt, according to some studies.
The health effects of nano- and microplastics haven’t been fully realized. Still, research has suggested that their accumulation in the human body can cause insulin resistance, liver metabolic disorder, DNA damage, organ dysfunction, immune response issues, neurotoxicity, and reproductive harm.
While the research team only focused on three types of nanoparticles, the discovery is a boon for public health. The team estimated that people who boil their water take in two to five times less nanoplastics than those who do not.
“Drinking boiled water apparently is a viable long-term strategy for reducing global exposure to [nano- and microplastics],” the research team wrote, adding that it is likely more effective than drinking bottled water, especially bottled in plastic. The average liter-sized bottle of water contains 240,000 pieces of nanoplastic, which is 10 to 100 times more particles than previously thought.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 20:20 - Rivian Shelves New Georgia Factory In Latest Cost-Cutting Measures
Rivian Shelves New Georgia Factory In Latest Cost-Cutting Measures
Two weeks after Rivian Automotive Inc. announced a disappointing production forecast and another round of job cuts, the company’s CEO revealed that the construction of a $5 billion factory in Georgia would be put on hold to reduce costs.
CEO RJ Scaringe unveiled a crossover EV called the R3. The new model will be priced lower than the R2 to increase affordability and boost sales.
Scaringe also surprised investors by announcing its new factory at the Georgia site east of Atlanta would be shelved.
“Rivian’s Georgia plant remains an extremely important part of its strategy to scale production of R2 and R3. The timing for resuming construction is expected to be later to focus its teams on the capital-efficient launch of R2 in Normal, Illinois,” the filing said.
The filing noted that the decision reduced capital expenditures for the automaker by $2.25 billion and “improved cash visibility.”
“Our Georgia site remains really important to us,” Scaringe said, adding, “It’s core to the scaling across all these vehicles, between R2, R3 and R3X. And we’re so appreciative of all the partnerships we’ve had there.”
No timetable was provided to investors about restarting work on the Georgia plant. Local governments have offered Rivian $1.5 billion in incentives to create thousands of jobs at the new plant.
Rivian’s shares jumped more than 13% on Thursday. In premarket trading in New York on Friday, shares are flat. Year-to-date performance has been awful, down 47%.
Short interest has surged in Rivian over the past year. Current data from Bloomberg shows 112.4 million shares short, or about 14.5% of the float is short.
Tom Narayan, an RBC Capital Markets analyst, warned in a note this week that Rivian’s financial implications of a lower-priced EV remain uncertain.
“Currently, R1 is losing money,” Narayan said, adding, “The critical question is how will Rivian be able to produce R2 profitably at the $45,000 price point?”
Last month, analyst Adam Jonas at Morgan Stanley penned a note titled “Can EV Slowdown Trigger Auto M&A Wave?”
“EV sentiment is extremely negative… and will eventually deteriorate further, in our view. Legacy OEMs must find a way to balance EV relevancy with capital discipline. Full OEM mergers are complex, politically sensitive and tough to execute. Could ‘merging’ EV projects be more reasonable?” Jonas said.
Consolidation is certainly a theme in the EV space this year.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 20:00 - Victor Davis Hanson: One Angry Biden Lie After Another
Victor Davis Hanson: One Angry Biden Lie After Another
Victor Davis Hanson’s calm and reasoned response with Tucker Carlson to President Biden’s SOTU address is worth every second:
Victor Davis Hanson discusses with Tucker Carlson, Joe Biden’s SOTU address.
Never has he seen a more angry speech to our country.
Credit: these two awesome Americans. @TuckerCarlson @VDHanson pic.twitter.com/9xUKeuJ2cn— Big Fish (@BigFish3000) March 8, 2024
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
But the professor put digital pen to paper in a post on X this afternoon, laying out all the details.
A demagogic fuming Biden gave another Phantom of the Opera speech blasting conservatives for all the destruction that he has caused and has resulted in his own historic unpopularity.
All too aware that he was confused and incoherent, his handlers felt that the antidote was to come out barking and bellowing at his imaginary enemies.
Any Never Trumper who would vote for such a screeching maniac is suicidal. The night’s nadir? Joe, of the Hunter-Biden family consortium, damned the money-grubbing “rich” who “don’t pay their fair share of taxes”—all of this when his own son is now facing multiple felony counts for not paying any income tax at all! And Joe himself has received lots of family money without paying tax on such “loan repayments”.
In truth, Biden gave the most livid state-of-the-union address in modern memory, a surreal teleprompted rant from a “get off my grass” old man. At points, he started howling at the seated opposition and even called out Supreme Court Justices. Determined not to reveal cognitive decline, Biden instead came late to the podium shouting nonstop, grimacing in reptilian style for over an hour.
If the planned Adderall-fueled screaming was to prove he was still alive, most would have preferred his drowsy incoherence.
But mostly the speech was one of abject lies as he either blamed all his disasters on others or claimed they were his greatest achievements.
Deficits? Why does he think we have high inflation and high interest rates after he took office? The debt was $28 trillion when he came in and now after just 3 years it is nearly $35—and is now growing by $1 trillion every 100 days. At the current rate a two-term Biden presidency would have in aggregate added $22 trillion more to national debt.
Ukraine? Biden started out with Ukraine, not inflation, not the border, not crime. Does he remember he suspended military aid to Ukraine upon taking office? Does he know that Putin did not invade a neighboring country in just one administration of the last four? Does he know why? Does he recall his humiliation in Afghanistan that green lighted
Putin? There are now 700,000 combined casualties in Ukraine and so what is the plan to end our Verdun? Another 6-month-long “spring offensive” against fortified lines?
Abortion? Biden screamed that the Dobbs decision outlaws abortion and threatens women’s lives when it allows any state to let its own people determine their own laws. Is Trump’s plan to let the states decide and to favor a 16-week ban more sensible than Biden’s abortion on demand that would allow some 5,000-10,000 partial birth or post-21 weeks abortions?
The Border? Do we remember Mayorkas bragging in detail how Biden rescinded all of Trump executive orders (he listed them by name) to destroy the border and let in 8-10 million illegal aliens? Biden campaigned on just that, calling on illegal aliens to “surge” the border.
Inflation? It is up 17% since he took office! Prices of the stuff of life have risen 30%—staple foods, fuel, appliances and care, shelter, mortgages. etc. January 6? In Bidenland a buffoonish afternoon riot now trumps Pearl Harbor—or the 120 days of looting, rioting, violence, death, and injury of summer 2020?
Gaza? Basically Hamas murders, rapes, tortures, and mutilates1,200 Jews, takes 250 hostages, rapes and murders untold numbers of them, is shielded by civilians beneath mosques, schools, and hospitals, and then the US blames Israel for retaliating. Biden cites bogus Hamas fatality figures, and promises to build a US port on the Gaza coast to pour in massive aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza.
This furious speech was a preview of the 2024 campaign. The Democratic nominee will run on abortion, January 6, and the ‘booming’ economy, hope leftwing prosecutors can bankrupt or incarcerate Trump, and ensure that in all the swing states 70 percent of the electorate do not vote in person on Election Day.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 19:40 - From Pioneer To Fallen Giant: How Hewlett Packard's Long List Of Failed Acquisitions Cost Its Reputation
From Pioneer To Fallen Giant: How Hewlett Packard’s Long List Of Failed Acquisitions Cost Its Reputation
Part 1 – Billion dollar bungles
In February, The Sunday Times interviewed the CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Antonio Neri. The story highlights that HPE, once a Silicon Valley pioneer, is now a fallen giant, completely eclipsed by the likes of Google, Amazon and Meta.
Hewlett Packard was one of the very first Palo Alto companies. Indeed, the garage in which Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began working together in the late 1930s is dubbed “the birthplace of Silicon Valley”. The two electrical engineering graduates from Stanford University initially produced sound equipment for Walt Disney Studios.
The HP garage, famous for being the epicenter of a technology revolution. Fast forward to the end of the 1990s, Hewlett Packard was a global company, known primarily for its personal computers and printers. It employed over 80,000 people, generating $48bn in net revenues, and had a market capitalization in excess of $17 billion.
Yet in the first decade of the 21st century, things began to go badly wrong for HP. It went through four CEOs from 2005 – 2011. Its reputation and its share price took a battering to the extent that it has never recovered its standing.
In his interview, Mr Neri acknowledges that the company lost its direction and failed to capitalize on trends like cloud, IoT and infrastructure. Mr Neri’s first big move was to acquire a company called Juniper Networks, described by The Sunday Times as “audacious”. HPE’s stock has fallen 15 per cent in the weeks since the deal was announced. “It’s a defining moment for the company and for me as a leader,” says Mr Neri, HPE’s biggest deal since the Compaq merger of 2002.
The Juniper deal brings more than faint echoes of the ghosts of HP acquisitions past. A bullish leader keen to make a big strategic play coupled with investor skepticism has been a repeat story for the company.
HP’s track record in acquisitions over the last two decades makes for painful reading. From the early 2000s, the company’s history is pock-marked with bungled acquisitions. The purchases of Compaq, Electronic Data Systems, Palm and Autonomy completely failed, caused internal turmoil and provoked shareholder outrage.
It is worth revisiting these stories to show where HP went so badly wrong and to underline that Mr Neri would be wise not to gloss over the case history of his company’s failed M&A.
Let’s start with the Compaq deal in 2001.
At the time, Hewlett Packard under the leadership of Carly Fiorina, who had been in post since 1999. HP had entered a period of struggles, with stock in decline and failed attempts to grow its services business. In September 2001, it agreed to buy Compaq for US$24.2 billion. The aim was to create a giant capable of competing with IBM, Dell and Gateway.
The investment community did not react well, plainly unconvinced by Fiorina’s vision. In the two days after the announcement, HP’s share price dropped 21.5%. Analysts could not see the logic in a high-margin printer business purchasing a company that was barely eking out a profit in personal computers. The $24.2 billion price tag was thought to be far too high in any case.
Opposition spread to HP’s shareholders. Remarkably, the sons of the two founders personally fought against the deal. Walter Hewlett saw that personal computers were low-margin and posed a risk to HP. David W. Packard, meanwhile, voiced concern about the number of expected lay-offs – totalling 9,000. He thought such a move ran totally counter to HP’s long-established values and would have appalled his father and Bill Hewlett.
In the event, shareholders did agree to the deal, but only by a wafer-thin margin of 2.8%. Claims of vote-buying involving Deutsche Bank flew around immediately after the vote, which further sullied the Compaq purchase. The SEC later fined Deutsche Bank $750,000 for “failing to disclose a material conflict of interest in its voting of client proxies” during the deal.
The view in the aftermath was that HP did indeed pay far too much for Compaq. This article in the Inquirer from 2003 analyses the financial performance after the deal, summarising that the virtues of the deal that HP peddled had not, at that point, materialised in a meaningful way.
By 2005, a full three years after the deal, the promised profits and shareholder returns were still not there. HP’s stock was still lagging far behind IBM and Dell and so Carly Fiorina was ousted in February of that year. She herself admitted that “buying Compaq hasn’t paid off for HP’s investors. And there’s no easy way out.”
The acquisition of Palm in 2010 was another catastrophe.
HP’s then CEO, Mark Hurd, was hugely enthusiastic about the deal to buy Palm for $1.2 billion. At the time, Palm was already struggling to compete with emerging smartphone giants like Apple, which had released the iPhone in 2007.
HP’s press release about the deal stated it would make the company a player in a fast-growing segment “with Palm’s innovative webOS platform and family of smartphones”. Hurd saw it as a way to diversify from the printer business. However, CFO Cathie Lesjak didn’t share his view and HP never committed the amount of investment into Palm required to make its new products a success.
To make matters worse, in August 2010, mere months after the deal, Mark Hurd suddenly resigned amid misconduct allegations. Hurd was the primary advocate and driver for a thorough integration of Palm, in particular webOS, into the HP business. With him gone, the odds of the integration being carried out successfully were drastically cut.
The HP TouchPad – a tablet device that Hurd had wanted created with Palm’s technology – was released in 2011. It was a consumer flop of epic proportions. A review on The Verge said, “the stability and smoothness of the user experience is not up to par with the iPad… coupled with the minuscule number of quality apps available at launch make this a bit of a hard sell right now.”
It took only six weeks after the launch of the TouchPad for Hurd’s successor, Leo Apotheker, to kill it. The company discontinued the device and ripped up all plans for similar consumer hardware products.
In 2011, HP wrote down US$1.67bn following its decision to wind down the device business – $0.4bn more than it paid for Palm. As AllThingsDigital put it “that was $1.2 billion well spent…”
The story of the Electronic Data Systems (EDS) acquisition was primarily one of poor integration and bad management.
In May 2008, HP bought EDS for $13.9bn. The aim was to bolster HP’s IT services business.
HP’s major misstep was to lay off so many talented people who had worked at EDS. There was a culture clash, too. As one executive present during the integration told Computer Weekly years after the deal, “EDS had its problems… but their attitude was to deliver exceptional customer service. HP was of the attitude that ‘if we are big enough, we set the standard’.”
In the same piece, EDS’ former financial services division head said HP fixated on short-term revenues rather than building long-term customer relationships. The loss of EDS staff compounded this issue, as they held strong customer relationships built up over time. Another analyst told the FT that what happened to EDS was a “travesty”.
The conclusion of the EDS story was not a pretty one. In August 2012, HP announced it was taking an $8bn write-down of its services business, dominated by the former EDS. One analyst said: “the charge for EDS shows what a mess that acquisition was.”
EDS was a case of poor integration, but the acquisition of Autonomy was on another level. It highlights the violent lurches between hardware, software and services in HP’s strategy during the first few years of the 2000s. It underlines the weak position HP was in and the boardroom dramas that had become commonplace. And it proved to be the most controversial of all of HP’s ill-fated purchases, resulting in more than a decade of litigation.
* * *
In the next article in the series, we’ll look at the origin of the deal and how it unravelled, causing the downfall of Leo Apotheker.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 19:20 - DC Court Greenlights Flurry Of Jan. 6 Lawsuits Against Trump
DC Court Greenlights Flurry Of Jan. 6 Lawsuits Against Trump
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A federal appeals court in the District of Columbia has issued an order allowing three Jan. 6 lawsuits to proceed against former President Donald Trump after a court rejected his assertion of presidential immunity.
Former President Donald Trump sits in New York State Supreme Court during the civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization, in New York City on Jan. 11, 2024. (Peter Foley/AFP via Getty Images) A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an order on March 8, allowing the three consolidated appeals to be “removed from abeyance” and approving motions for summary affirmance, meaning removing a temporary hold on the cases and allowing them to proceed.
The lawsuits that are now allowed to proceed are Moore v. Trump, Kirkland v. Trump, and Tabron v. Trump.
In all three civil suits, law enforcement officers are seeking damages based on the premise that President Trump incited a mob to storm the Capitol, leading to a violent incident in which they sustained various injuries and suffered harm, including emotional distress.
President Trump has denied calling for violence on Jan. 6, pointing to remarks he made encouraging his supporters to demonstrate “peacefully and patriotically.”
‘Matters of Public Concern’
The judges noted in their March 8 order that the merits of the three parties’ positions “are so clear as to warrant summary action,” and that the cases can proceed based on a Dec. 1 appeals court decision in Blassingame v. Trump that President Trump is not immune to lawsuits over the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol.
In Blassingame v. Trump, the former president’s attorneys had argued that he should be granted immunity because his alleged actions around Jan. 6 amounted to official speech on “matters of public concern.”
The judges’ reasoning in that case was that the former president’s actions leading up to and on Jan. 6 were part of his campaign for a second term in the White House and not an official presidential act.
“In arguing that he is entitled to official-act immunity in the cases before us, President Trump does not dispute that he engaged in his alleged actions up to and on January 6 in his capacity as a candidate. But he thinks that does not matter,” U.S. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan, appointed under President Barack Obama, wrote in the Dec. 1 ruling.
“Rather, in his view, a president’s speech on matters of public concern is invariably an official function, and he was engaged in that function when he spoke at the January 6 rally and in the leadup to that day. We cannot accept that rationale.”
Later, a similar order denying presidential immunity in Jan. 6 cases was issued on Dec. 29, in a lawsuit filed in 2021 by Capitol Police veteran Conrad Smith and seven of his colleagues.
“On appeal, the only question is whether President Trump has demonstrated his entitlement to official-act immunity,” reads the Dec. 29 order, which was signed by a three-judge panel consisting of Judge Srinivasan and Judges Judith Rogers and Gregory Katsas.
The judges in that case laid out a similar rationale for denying President Trump’s argument that he should be protected from liability because his statements and actions on Jan. 6 amounted to making statements that are of concern to the public.
“That argument fails” because President Trump’s commentary and actions around Jan. 6 bear “no inherent connection to the essential distinction between official and unofficial acts” because they were not part of his official duties to share “matters of public concern,” the judges wrote, concluding he’s ineligible for presidential immunity.
In the Dec. 29 ruling, the judges also cited the Blassingame v. Trump judgment and said the case brought by Mr. Smith and his colleagues is “indistinguishable” in all relevant aspects, so they issued what amounts to an identical determination that President Trump is not immune from civil lawsuits related to Jan. 6.
A request for comment on the Dec. 29 judgment sent to the Trump campaign was not returned before press time.
The former president is entitled to request a rehearing before a full panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals in the immunity case. He could also appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
However, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear President Trump’s appeal in a separate federal criminal case alleging election interference, which was brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
President Trump’s appeal in this case also claims immunity, with the Supreme Court set to hear oral arguments during the week of April 22.
A determination on presidential immunity by the Supreme Court could have implications for the lawsuits that the District of Columbia appeals court just allowed to proceed.
‘Peacefully and Patriotically’
Even though President Trump said in his Jan. 6 speech that protesters should “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” his critics have seized on a portion of his remarks where he said “we fight like hell” and “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Critics claim this was a call for violence.
The former president has, on numerous occasions, denied calling for violent protests while insisting he meant his remarks about fighting like hell metaphorically.
Former President Donald Trump speaks to the media at a hotel after attending a hearing before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals at the federal courthouse in Washington on Jan. 9, 2024. (Susan Walsh/AP Photo) In one of the Jan. 6 cases against the former president, Smith v. Trump, the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights filed the lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Smith and seven of his colleagues, arguing that President Trump deliberately incited violence against members of Congress and law enforcement officers whose duty was to protect them.
President Trump has rejected the claim that he in any way incited violence on Jan. 6, 2021, pointing to remarks he made that called for demonstrators to protest peacefully. In a bid to dismiss the lawsuit, his attorneys argued that the complaint should be tossed because he, as president, was eligible for immunity.
The court rejected President Trump’s bid to have the case dismissed, however, leading eventually to the Dec. 29 judgment that his remarks on Jan. 6 were not official acts as president, so the immunity shield doesn’t apply.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 19:00 - JP Morgan Looked To Acquire Discover Before Capital One
JP Morgan Looked To Acquire Discover Before Capital One
Maybe this is why Elizabeth Warren was so quick to protest the Capital One/Discover merger…
In an open letter out days ago Sen. Elizabeth Warren was quick to urge regulators to block the pending Capital One/Discover merger. In her letter, penned alongside other anti-corporate members of congress like AOC and Ro Khanna, she wrote that: “To protect consumers and financial stability, we urge you to block this merger and strengthen your proposed policy statement to prevent harmful deals in the future.”
“This merger announcement comes less than a week after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a new report revealing the impact of credit card industry consolidation on consumers,” the lawmakers wrote. “According to the report, large banks charge higher interest rates than small credit card issuers, with ‘[n]early half of the largest credit card issuers’ — including Capital One — ‘offering cards with a maximum purchase APR over 30%,” her letter says.
It continues: “Additionally, Capital One and Discover have concerning track records of mistreating customers and compliance failures. The lawmakers noted that in 2012, the CFPB ordered Capital One to refund $140 million to 2 million consumers with low credit scores and low credit limits who were misled into paying for costly add-on products. In 2023, Discover was required by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to address ‘violations of, and consumer harm related to’ various consumer financial laws.”
And now, speaking of compliance failures, PYMNTS and FT have reported that JP Morgan was actually the first bank to try and make a deal for Discover.
J.P. Morgan Chase considered acquiring Discover Financial before Capital One finalized a $35 billion deal for the company, the report says. The bank explored the acquisition for about a year to expand beyond traditional card networks but abandoned the plan due to challenges, including convincing Discover and facing regulatory hurdles.
“This would’ve been a truly company-changing deal,” a source told FT.
Sources told FT that Dimon’s firm started looking at its bid for the company in the middle of 2021, but a year later has abandoned plans, as it was unable to convince Discover of the plan.
Capital One’s acquisition of Discover, announced last month, aims to create a global payments network. This move could significantly impact the banking sector, especially in catering to Americans living paycheck to paycheck, a demographic that represents a large portion of the population across various income levels. The deal’s approval by regulators remains uncertain, with concerns about market concentration in the card issuing and payment networks sectors.
And call us curious, but we can’t help but wonder what Sen. Warren’s take would have been if her crypto loathing pal Jamie Dimon had been first to make a play at Discover…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 18:40 - You Have Got To Be Kidding Me…?
You Have Got To Be Kidding Me…?
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
By the time you are done reading this article, you may be tempted to tear your hair out. A substantial portion of the U.S. population is deeply struggling in our current economic environment, but instead of focusing on helping Americans that are hurting, homeless and hungry, our leaders are going to great lengths to make things better for those that have no legal right to be in this country. Our priorities are way out of whack, and U.S. voters are fed up. Immigration has become the hottest political issue during this campaign season, but many of our politicians still don’t seem to understand why so many of us are so frustrated with what has been going on.
Let me give you some examples of what I am talking about.
It is being reported that more than half of all Americans over the age of 65 “are living on incomes of $30,000 or less a year”…
And, for some, the retirement crisis is already here. Just over half of Americans over the age of 65 are living on incomes of $30,000 or less a year, according to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The largest share — just under 23% — have incomes between $10,000 and $19,999.
Millions of elderly Americans are barely surviving at this point.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has been flying hundreds of thousands of migrants that have no legal right to be here directly into the country…
It means that while record numbers of migrants were flowing over the southern border last year, the Biden White House was also directly transporting them into the country.
Use of a cell phone app has allowed for the near undetected arrival by air of 320,000 aliens with no legal rights to enter the United States.
It comes after a controversy over a 2022 transportation program in which the administration used taxpayers money to move migrants throughout the country on overnight flights.
You have got to be kidding me.
Let me give you another example.
Since 2020, the income needed “to comfortably afford a home in the US” has gone up by 80 percent…
According to Zillow, the income needed to comfortably afford a home in the US has leapt 80% since 2020, far exceeding what the BLS reports has been a 23% increase in median household income over the same period.
The real estate website found home buyers today need to make more than $106,000 a year, up $47,000 from 2020, a change driven largely by higher prices and borrowing costs.
“Housing costs have soared over the past four years as drastic hikes in home prices, mortgage rates and rent growth far outpaced wage gains,” said Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist at Zillow.
But instead of doing something about that, politicians in California actually want to provide interest-free home loans with no down payment required to newly arrived migrants…
Assembly Bill 1840 would change existing law to allow illegal immigrants to be eligible for the California Dream for All Fund, which provides interest-free loans for a down payment on a home for first-time buyers.
The bill was introduced by California Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula, a Democrat, who last month told GV Wire, a Fresno-based news outlet, that he “wanted to ensure that qualified first-time homebuyers include undocumented applicants.”
You have got to be kidding me.
Don’t stop reading now, because there is more.
On Thursday, we learned that the number of layoffs in the U.S. last month was the highest total that we have seen during February since 2009…
The pace of job cuts by U.S. employers accelerated in February, a sign the labor market is starting to deteriorate in the face of ongoing inflation and high interest rates.
That is according to a new report published Thursday by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which found that companies planned 84,638 job cuts in February, a 3% increase from the previous month and a 9% jump from the same time last year.
It marked the highest layoff total for the month of February in data going back to 2009.
That is terrible news.
But instead of finding jobs for American workers, New York Governor Kathy Hochul wants to “prioritize” hiring newly arrived migrants for state jobs…
New York Governor Kathy Hochul is pushing a plan to prioritize hiring illegal aliens for state jobs by eliminating certain requirements like the civil service exam and high school diploma.
The aim is to expedite the process for illegal immigrants to secure state jobs once they have work permits.
You have got to be kidding me.
Last but not least, let’s talk about what is going on in Washington right now.
In preparation for the State of the Union address, a “large steel fence” was being put up around the U.S. Capitol…
Ahead of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address this evening – what concerns do the political elites on Capitol Hill have that require security crews to erect a large steel fence around the immediate perimeter of the Capitol Complex?
In several posts on X, FOX News Senior Congressional Correspondent Chad Pergram said the steel, grated 12-foot fence around the Capitol Complex was erected on Wednesday night on the orders of the Secret Service.
Apparently our leaders in Washington have no problem with being protected by walls.
Unfortunately, our southern border has been left wide open and it is being estimated that approximately 10 million migrants have come pouring into this nation since Joe Biden entered the White House…
The number of illegal immigrants in the country has roughly doubled under President Biden. The United States had some 10.2 million illegal immigrants in 2020, and another 10 million have entered during Biden’s presidency. If the 20 million illegal immigrants were all in one state, it would be tied with New York for the fourth most populated state.
And here’s even worse news. If Biden wins a second term in office and there is no serious reform of U.S. immigration and asylum laws — both of which are very real possibilities — we can expect a continuing increase in the rate of immigrants crossing the border illegally.
You have got to be kidding me.
We already have tens of millions of people that are deeply suffering in this country.
To allow millions more to come marching in doesn’t make any sense at all.
We can’t even afford to take care of the people that we already have. We are completely broke, and we have been adding another trillion dollars to the national debt about every 100 days.
We are literally committing national suicide, but most of our politicians don’t seem alarmed by this at all.
* * *
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/08/2024 – 18:20
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