Ben Shapiro, Made In China, Promoted By Zuck
Ben Shapiro, Made In China, Promoted By Zuck
Why Mark Zuckerberg white labels The Daily Wire
This post may be a tad meandering but it’s something I’ve wanted to put together for a few years now.
Ben Shapiro, the proprietor of the Daily Wire, often brags about his “bed of money.” He mentioned the bed in an exchange on Bill Maher’s show.
But Shapiro doesn’t let on that that money was purchased, in part, by Chinese intelligence through cultist fracking billionaires.
Nor does Shapiro disclose that he has a sweet heart traffic deal with Mark Zuckerberg, an arrangement which was secured by none other than their mutual friend Jared Kushner.
In this mutually beneficial relationship Zuckerberg has appointed Shapiro his house conservative -- The Daily Wire is one of the most trafficked site on Facebook -- and the two dined together on several occasions.
If a publication is white listed by Facebook that publication stands to gain tremendous traffic. It could even collect derivative data from being so favored. Shapiro is not happy that people have noticed his grift.
The relationship is highly profitable for Shapiro who converts the page views into advertising for his podcast and his website. Collecting that data on conservatives is powerful for political or influence campaigns.
Shapiro, in turn, favors Mark Zuckerberg’s talking points, especially when it comes to antitrust regulations. Shapiro has praised Zuckerberg’s supposed commitment to free speech and even favored Facebook’s talking points on antitrust, claiming implausibly that breaking up Facebook would somehow be dangerous for America’s national security. In fact, Zuckerberg’s role where only he can make decisions about acquisitions is a threat to national security insofar as he can make unilateral acquisitions. Zuckerberg has flirted with Chinese leaders and done deals with Russian oligarchs.
Kushner, Zuckerberg, and Shapiro were all closely aligned during the Trump years. All three have sought power above all else. All three have sought Chinese support, financial or political. All three have connections to Harvard’s Jewish community, notwithstanding their very different relationships to the faith. Shapiro is Orthodox while Kushner is close to Russian-aligned Chabad and Zuckerberg isn’t particularly observant, having once worked on Yom Kippur.
The alliance between Trump world and Ben Shapiro was unlikely. Shapiro backed Senator Ted Cruz in the GOP primaries thanks to Cruz and Shapiro’s shared financial backing through the Wilks Brothers. (We will turn to them in a moment.) Shapiro even pushed the fraud about Michelle Fields being assaulted by Corey Lewandowski.
Though Shapiro wasn’t particularly close with Fields he used the occasion to try to launch his own website -- The Daily Wire. Shapiro’s previous effort — Truth Revolt — failed thanks to Shapiro struggling to raise money for it. Shapiro ran afoul of both David Horowitz, who initially backed Truth Revolt and cultivated Ben as a successor, and Bob Shillman, one of the main backers of the Horowitz Freedom Center. “Shapiro was always doing multiple jobs and pretending he was working for us,” Shillman told me at the time.
Shapiro, with backing from the Wilks, launched The Daily Wire in 2016. It was an exercise in branding but also influence peddling.
Shapiro had to become the brand. “‘You being a brand brings a lot of security. . . . You being a front man gives us a ton of security,” Boreing recalled telling him. “I can better accomplish that with video. I can expose a lot more people to you with video, I can expose them to you in a way that they’ll remember, because people are visual. . . . Let me make you famous and we’ll have a much louder voice and a much bigger platform to advance our interests.”
Advance our interests? What interests might those be?
“The quality of the content is, obviously, the passion of the artist. The success of the content is marketing and distribution,” Boreing told me when I visited the Daily Wire’s studios in Sherman Oaks. “You can raise money and make a film that no one ever sees, or you can raise money and market a film that everyone sees.”
Shapiro could get distribution by promising to deal with the conservatives for Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg quickly whitelisted Shapiro as part of the controversial program first uncovered by Channel 4 in the UK. Once white listed Shapiro could pretend to be influential. He could take advantage of Facebook’s algorithm promoting video or the enragement engagement engine.
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He could do all of this because Shapiro was subsidized by the Wilks brothers to the tune of millions of dollars.
Who are they? The Wilks’s fortune comes directly from China through Singapore which bought their company FracTech.
Are the Wilks a front for Chinese interests? It sure seems that way. Let’s go to Reuters from December 2011:
Middle East and Chinese oil companies Saudi Aramco, China Petroleum & Chemical Corp (Sinopec) and CNOOC Ltd are in talks to buy an up to 30 percent stake in North American oil and gas services company Frac Tech International in a deal worth about $2.2 billion, two sources with knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday.
…
They added that Frac Tech was also in advanced talks with Saudi Aramco, Repsol-YPF SA and Sinopec to establish three separate fracking joint ventures in the Middle East, Argentina and China.
Ultimately Frac Tech cut a deal with Singapore and Chinese investors. They set about funding their cultish church and far right organizations through their nonprofits, loaded up with hundreds of millions of dollars.
They are also buying up a lot of land, in much the same way that billionaire Bill Gates did before he was taken down. The size of the purchases are quite disturbing.
The Wilks brothers have gone on a land-buying spree out West, amassing huge holdings in Montana, Idaho, Texas, Kansas, and Colorado. In December 2012, the Billings Gazette reported that they had amassed more than 276,000 acres in Montana, or more than 430 square miles; more recent reports say they own more than 301,300 acres in the state. Among their purchases was the historic 62,000-acre N Bar Ranch, which had been listed for $45 million.
The Daily Wire benefited from fear that conservatives would call on the Trump Justice Department to break up Facebook.
Here’s how BuzzFeed describes it:
…Facebook users began complaining that they were seeing posts from conservative personalities including Ben Shapiro in their News Feeds even though they had never engaged with that type of content.
When the issue was flagged internally, Facebook’s content policy team warned that removing such suggestions for political content could reduce those pages’ engagement and traffic, and possibly inspire complaints from publishers. A News Feed product manager and a policy team member reiterated this argument in an August post to Facebook’s internal message board.
“A noticeable drop in distribution for these producers (via traffic insights for recommendations) is likely to result in high-profile escalations that could include accusations of shadow-banning and/or FB bias against certain political entities during the US 2020 election cycle,” they explained. Shadow-banning, or the limiting of a page’s circulation without informing its owners, is a common accusation leveled by right-wing personalities against social media platforms.
In other words, Zuckerberg had put his thumb on the scale to help Shapiro.
This tilting of what trends and what doesn’t on Facebook has become standard practice for Facebook, according to the Wall Street Journal’s masterly Facebook Files series.
Shapiro, in turn, began using his artificially boosted traffic to sell advertisers. That’s what kept the con going. He’d build up a database of conservative users and then sell that data to others. You might even consider if such an op was an intelligence op.
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The relationship between Kushner and Zuckerberg was fostered by Peter Thiel. Kushner thought of himself as something of a tech mogul, having launched WinRed. WinRed collects data on Republican users. WinRed then turns around and buys ads on Facebook. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone of washing money. This money funnel explains why Facebook was never going to ban Trump until the last possible moment: they didn’t want to ban its best customer.
Facebook, then, was always an influence engine. It just depended on who was paying for it.
Shapiro is also in keeping with Israeli tactics over the years to influence the American conservative blogosphere.
I’ve known Ben Shapiro for many years. We were introduced in 2009 by none other than Andrew Breitbart who Irish by birth but raised by West Side Jews, was enamored of Shapiro’s Harvard Law pedigree. After Andrew’s untimely death Shapiro and Joel Pollak, Breitbart’s editor in chief, used a video I found of Barack Obama hugging Derrick Bell to insinuate that Obama was a racist or some such.
Shapiro, using the Wilks money, is following the lead of fellow Jews like the late Sheldon Adelson or Steve Wynn whose casino empire was backed with Chinese cash through Macao. Adelson’s ties to the Chinese mob go back quite a long way back, all the way to his days when SoftBank bought his company for $800m in 1995.
Shapiro made clear his own allegiances to the Jerusalem Post.
“As a US Jew, I can’t be more grateful to the people of Israel for protecting and defending not only eternal values but the survival of Western civilization more broadly. It’s not often enough that US Jews say thank you to Israelis, but they ought to.... Americans benefit from having Israelis on the front lines protecting civilization and Jewish lives,” he said.
“I have enormous hakarat hatov [gratitude] for Israelis,” Shapiro added.
How far does that gratitude extend? Could it extend to foreign collusion on behalf of Israeli politics?
A psyop has to be managed after all. You might even say feelings don’t care about the facts.
The well-meaning Boomers at my local GOP wanted to attract more youth to their events. Seeing this apparent popularity, they invited Ben Shapiro to speak at a fundraising dinner. He wanted a 40k speaking fee. They opted for Candace Owens instead.
I would like to know more about what made you do a complete 180. So fascinating. Did people readily accept your conversion or were they suspicious of you at first?
Thank you for introducing the Wilks Brothers. My first hearing of them.