Changing My Mind About Claremont and Big Tech Censorship

What Critical Race Theory Vs. Declarationism Gets Wrong About America

Breaking with friends is never easy but it is sometimes necessary. You find that you have less and less in common as the arguments of the day mature and as experience and observation sober you up. You wonder quietly and then loudly, “what the hell was I thinking?” and then “what should I do now?” Duty requires clear thinking and clear thinking requires quiet reflection. Republics, are, after all, formed by reflection and choice. So Publius tells us and so we believe. 

And so let’s reflect then on January 6th.  

January 6 — Epiphany in the Christian tradition — was an epiphany to me — about the country, its penetration by foreign intelligence services and the fragility and resiliency of her institutions, and the role I unwittingly played both in causing the breakdown and now must play in setting it right. 

I am very proud that Clearview, the facial recognition firm I cofounded, caught thousands of rioters during both the events of January 6th and the George Floyd riots in Summer 2020. 

But I am horrified by the kind of Claremont caesarism that encouraged those rioters to descend upon the Capitol in the first place and by the lack of mercy afforded to the mentally ill dupes who followed that caesarism into the jail cell. We must do better. We cannot allow our crazies to be weaponized against us.  

No, the moment called for sober-minded prudence. Congressmen Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan, among others, implored Trump to call off the mob. He would not.  

When your disagreements with friends are stylistic or temperamental they require no public elaboration — the world is a big place and its best to wish people well and move along — but when they are matters of principle it requires an explanation so here’s mine: I increasingly believe that the Claremont Institute’s rhetoric and ideas are both dangerous and contemptuous. They deserve renunciation.  Given that I helped put many Claremont fellows into government after the 2016 election through my informal role on the transition team I am more than a little bit culpable. 

Indeed, in light of the recent events where Claremont Institute board member John Eastman all but provided the arguments for an American putsch I am left with little choice. Eastman ought to be disbarred. He did not use his law degree for the betterment of society but to give a defense of a coup. He would prefer no doubt that the closeted Claremont fellow Tom Cotton would do the coup.

When gay rumors dogged then Congressman Tom Cotton – he and incumbent Senator Mark Pryor reportedly elected not to go there and Pryor’s wife later left him for a woman — Cotton reportedly called up Larry Arnn of Hillsdale. Cotton had always lived a sort of double life. 

Larry Arnn was a founder of Claremont. Arnn’s mentor was engaged in a similar odd political project – the Judeaization of Sir Winston Churchill. Martin Gilbert, himself the son of a jeweler, was engaged in a very Israeli project indeed. Arnn helped Cotton find a wife. She’s a neocon naturally. Or, perhaps, they’ll do the coup with Governor Ron DeSantis, slated to give the Claremont Institute’s statesmanship award later this month, whose sycophancy for the late Sheldon Adelson knows few limits. DeSantis is clearly compromised by Israeli intelligence. One of his donors is Ike Perlmutter, who illegally tried to access American service members health records and DNA.

Let’s be candid about the role John Eastman played. He incited a mob. I watched the speech in real time, somewhat bemused – “Hey, don’t I know that guy?” – and later horrified by what exactly he was calling for. (I am terribly introverted and prefer not to attend large gatherings. Oh yes, covid has been a wonderful excuse.)

This Eastman speech isn’t very Lincolnian or Coolidgean. I texted Tom Klingenstein, the chairman and main funder of the Claremont Institute, calling on Eastman to resign from Claremont. He hasn’t replied. I struggled mightily as to why that might be. Could it be that Tom agrees with John? 

In recent years Claremont has pursued a secessionist, militant approach. A better way would be to encourage noblesse oblige – that recalls to America’s new oligarchs their duties to the Common Good, or at least, frightens them enough to act in the public interest. We can get there. 

Claremont’s supposed pro-American donors include billionaire Paul Singer, who when he isn’t devastating the Heartland, outsources American jobs and technology to Israel, funds the Fusion GPS dossier, and topples American allied governments. The Washington Free Beacon is the vehicle through which the anti-Trump donor Paul Singer laundered its research directly into the FBI. Its new editor is Elianna Johnson, who is the daughter of Scott Johnson, of Powerline blogging fame.

The late Foster Friess called for endless wars in the Middle East while Rebekah Mercer cozies up with Russian interests. This is not normal. This is a sort of foreign intelligence influence operation masquerading as a think tank.

At least one of Claremont’s fellows has had his own problems. Much as I loved the late Angelo Codevilla I struggled mightily when he backed returning Jonathan Pollard to Israel.

Indeed Trump’s final act in office was to pardon Pollard’s Israeli handler Aviem Sella. Far from being gracious the Israelis quickly promoted Sella to brigadier general. Trump’s largest donor – the late Sheldon Adelson – flew Pollard back to Israel, where, upon arrival, he kissed the ground. He has since said it was the duty of every American Jew to spy for Israel. 

Taking Pollard’s invitation to heart was Sheldon Adelson who was revealed to be a CIA asset who spied on Julian Assange. Adelson nevertheless took millions of dollars from Chinese intelligence through his casinos in Macao. When I traveled back from meeting with Assange I was beset by Israeli spies. Assange himself told me that he was under surveillance by the Israelis. 

Codevilla’s public advocacy raises a lot of questions. He called for breaking up the CIA, reforming the FBI, and abolishing FISA. He worked on the very mobbed up Ronald Reagan 1980 presidential transition. 

Was the great Angelo compromised? We aren't supposed to ask that question. It’s poor form but it’s worth asking all the same. He had a very brief career in the Foreign Service — an odd sort of thing for a polyglot. Were Codevilla compromised he wouldn’t be alone. He served as a staff member of the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, serving with Senator Malcolm Wallop. Wallop is rather corrupt himself and came under disrepute for leaking grand jury investigations into a corrupt member of Congress.

The committee’s prior chairman — James Wolfe — was caught having an affair with a reporter he was disclosing classified material to. He was removed but not before doing real damage to our national intelligence.

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How should we think of John Eastman’s star turn? 

In fairness I suspect Eastman was corrupted by the fame of the moment. He got swept up in it. There was no Lyceum speech affect. Nor call to the mystic chords of memory of Lincoln, no wish that we might, despite our misgivings on the authenticity of the vote, work within a system to see it redresses, lest we descend into madness and barbarity. Millions of Americans are now first time gun owners thanks to the Chinese-backed Black Lives Matter riots. Is that really wise? 

There have been disputed elections before and no doubt will be disputed elections far into the future. How then shall we respond?

The Declaration of Independence provides a frame. In it, Jefferson argues that the Americans and the English have gone their separate ways and that, as articulated in Common Sense, it really would be prudent to separate, peacefully, with the Mother Country. The Founders tried everything short of conflict.

Has Claremont?

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At this point such a resignation feels more like a formality than official but given that I am often asked for my views on Claremont I thought I’d gather them here so that I might have a place to direct those who’ve asked me in so many words, “What’s up with Claremont?” 

They hope that, because I once dutifully attended the Claremont meetings, I might have some sort of insight. After all I was a Claremont Review of Books fellow and a Publius fellow in 2012. I wrote speeches for its members and helped several of them run for political office. I edited their publications. I was one of Harry Jaffa’s last students. Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, wrote the forward to my book on Calvin Coolidge. 

 I am still grateful for the kindnesses and friendships many individual members in the Claremont network have shown me. I’ve crashed on their couches and drunk way too much at too many of their events. I’ve sobered up in every sense. I wish them well individually but not so long as their efforts continue this political project. 

What is Claremont’s political project anyway?

I suspect it is secessionism through the cover of federalism – not a bad move in an America that is increasingly multiracial. Fissures will undoubtedly emerge. However well meaning Claremont’s project will lead to real conflict. 

I take its chairman, Tom Klingenstein, both literally and seriously, when he frames this conflict as a sort of Cold Civil War between America and “Woke Communism.”

In this framing he’s following the less artful Claremont fellow Andrew Breitbart who declared simply “#War” — hashtag included. 

That’s not to say that Klingenstein is entirely wrong — only incomplete. Maybe his father, John, who worked alongside the American deep state neglected to teach him fully. After all, John was a big backer of the Columbia Teachers College, a sort of CIA training ground. 

To be sure Klingenstein’s right to embrace Americanism and to turn against the Woketopians but there’s no program on how to achieve it. No, it is not enough to call out the Communist problem (if that is indeed what it is.) You must have a program and that program needs to rest on things other than mere abstraction. Klingenstein’s abstractionism may well lead to a war, however flattering it may be. It’s nice, after all, to believe in the Declaration as a kind of American creed but let’s not create zealots or martyrs. 

And while Klingenstein’s Declarationism pays Americans quite the compliment — you are so nice that you’d allow anyone to become an American if they just study up! — other attempts to claim the founding haven’t been as generous. 

There have been other attempts to lay claim to America and her founding. How should we think of Ukrainian-born Len Blavatnik then, an arriviste Jewish immigrant with both American and British passports, funding the play Hamilton?

Is casting American history with an all black cast not favoring the Great Replacement? Is it not a form of cultural appropriation or even, dare I say it, cultural genocide? 

No, instead we should follow Gore Vidal — that gay American bard.  

"The only thing interesting about the United States is our history. Start right off from the Revolution on, or even the Indian wars. Do all that. It's wildly interesting. And it's the most unpopular subject among children. I think it's Perdue once a year asks the graduating seniors "which subject do you like the most" and "which is the one you most hate" and it's always American history. Now you'd have to be a genius to make that uninteresting. You'd have to really have to have great gifts of boredom, beyond the norm available to most people. I spent my life writing American history, feeling a bit guilty because I often think it's you know it's hard work, why am I doing this? The school should have done it."

For some of us to know American history is to know our families and ultimately ourselves. The heroic deeds of the past have purchase on us especially when at least some of the same blood runs through our veins.

If they can do it I can do it too. 

When your ancestors come over on the Mayflower or you are a Son of the American Revolution on both sides of your family you understand that America isn’t a place or an idea but it’s the place where you bury your dead. 

Neither Vidal nor I had a lot of patience for those who don’t know the Civil War or who pretend that America is their country when it is self-evidently not. When you hold two passports you always have the chance of escape, don’t you? 

No, I don’t think that the relatives I had who were wounded in the Civil War or who were killed in the American Revolution were reciting the Declaration or humming The Star-Spangled Banner as they were loading their muskets and charging hills. And no, I shan’t be paying any reparations. That debt has been paid in blood. 

If the schools do not teach you, you must teach yourself. Be more afraid of the schools teaching you wrong, as is so often the case. 

What then is my American curriculum?

Read Gore Vidal’s novels. Read David Hackett Fischer’s Albion Seed: Four Folkways in America and know that Americans were a people long before she was a nation. 

My program? Resist those and that which divides us. Give division no purchase, no attention, no quarter, no mindshare and no affection. 

Turn off Fox. Turn off MSNBC. #DeleteFacebook! 

There’s much fetishization of immigrants these days. To be sure there are immigrants who’ve been made American but that process has not been easy. Immigration is always and everywhere a deracination. Naturalization has been the work of generations and some groups have had an easier go of it than others. 

But there should be more gratitude bestowed to the settlers who tamed this land. 

No, I won’t quite break into a rendition of “You’re Welcome” by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in Maui but, well, you are. 

Declarationism vs. Critical Race Theory vs. The American People

A clash  then between the woke New York Times Jews who push the 1619 Project and the Claremont Jews who hold to the Declaration of Independence abstractionism may draw in auxiliaries — the Ivy League blacks, say, or the redneck mothers bemoaning school board’s “Critical Race Theory” curriculum — but that isn’t really getting to the heart of the program.  

To topple statues misses the mark. We must get to root causes and so let’s talk about Judah Benjamin, one of our first Jewish senators and confidante to Jefferson Davis. We might consider reading James Taub’s very good new book Judah Benjamin: Counselor to the Confederacy. Yes, let’s do have a registration of everyone everywhere who owned slaves and participated in the slave trade. Let’s have those who descend from slaves be the first to be paid by those who descend from the slave owners. I think you should lead by example, Mr. Arthur Sulzberger Jr.  Your family owned slaves and defended the practice.

I jest, of course, we all know that we can’t punish the children for the sins of the parent. Didn’t we learn just that with the judgments (or lack thereof) against the Sackler Family, which poisoned a good many of us?

Thanks to St. Ronald Reagan you can poison million of us without suffering any real consequences in the here and now. You can even be the head of the FDA, approve a vaccine, and go work for Pfizer, the developer of the vaccine. You can even hire Frank Luntz, who will work for you like he worked for Jeffrey Epstein and Les Wexner and Kevin McCarthy. 

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Both the Declarationism and CRT seek to divide us into an us and a them. Man does not live by abstraction. He lives by works — perhaps, even the works of a nation are the collective efforts of the generations of young men and women pulling together. 

“Red states, red tech,” says Claremont’s Vice President of Education Matt Peterson.

How Peterson plans to achieve this policy goal isn’t clear. Nor do I believe it to be feasible. 

Indeed the logic of the internet requires centralization, as it is with all software-based technology. This is the key insight of Peter Thiel’s Zero To One which notes that zero marginal cost distribution of software ultimately leads to monopolization of markets. Government doesn’t want a panoply of companies but only a few that they might be able to regulate.  

The Founders understood that mastery of the technology of the day is essential. 

Ultimately you are governed at the speed of technology — Coolidge had radio; Reagan and JFK had TV; and Obama had Facebook. Trump had Twitter but he could not be allowed to keep it because his thoughts were well, too erratic. He won’t join Parler because he’s owned by the Israelis and Likud not the Russians, thank you. 

Nowadays technology governs at the speed of thought. That speed of communication requires government oversight and ultimately a quasi-nationalization. Nothing can be bigger than the State. This is what’s really going on with the Facebook whistleblower. She is an op from a deep state to wake America from its ad-addled trance. 

But Charles, you ask, won’t Big Tech censor more if it’s regulated by the government? And isn’t that bad? I’m not so sure, provided that that censorship’s victims have a means and method of redress and that it be done by fellow Americans who know the cultural context of the remarks.

To the extent that Big Tech censors it’s because its penetrated by foreigners, or, and this is more disturbing, your mind is controlled by foreigners. 

It’s dangerous to be an influencer and some of your favorite influencers have ties to foreign intelligence whether you know it or not. None of this sort of thing is disclosed or sometimes even known—even to the recipient of the funding. 

Ben Shapiro doesn’t let you know that he’s gotten money from the Chinese government by way of the Wilks Brothers’s fracking empire or that he has a separate peace with Mark Zuckerberg. 

I doubt Nick Fuentes even knows the provenance of the strange bitcoin donations. He is a useful idiot, as the Russians, would have it. The Russians don’t care either whether or not Fuentes is no platformed or denied banking services. 

Could it be that many of the people who have been no platformed have been canceled for being too close to foreign actors? Might they be constructs of foreign intelligence operations? 

Do you still believe Q Anon isn’t a massive psychological hypnosis operation directed at our more suggestible citizens, who are, no doubt, genetically predisposed to hypnosis?

In the past these censorship decisions were made largely for politically correct reasons. I found this out the hard way though I am happy to be forced off of Twitter.

I called out fake rape victim Jackie Coakley for the Rolling Stone hoax. Coakley had been used by Sabrina Rubin Erdely to try to destroy frat culture at the University of Virginia. Erdely came out of the New Republic crowd, along with her classmate and friend Stephen Glass. She was attacking UVA because it’s okay to hate white Virginians. UVA is the place where the US intelligence community continues to recruit its members. An attack on UVA is an attack on America. That is what Candidate Joe Biden meant when he said he was running because of Russian-backed Charlottesville riot.

Biden was sending a message — that he understood our intelligence community is under attack at home and abroad— and indeed it is.

Seth Hettena @seth_hettena

The Times hints at a secret intelligence war being waged. US adversaries are using facial recognition software, biometric scans, and computer hacking to out the CIA’s sources overseas. And they are succeeding.

nytimes.comCaptured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of InformantsCounterintelligence officials said in a top secret cable to all stations and bases around the world that too many of the people it recruits from other countries to spy for the U.S. are being lost.

Today Rolling Stone magazine is under better management. The lawsuits were essential to cleaning up the publication, just as they will be to restoring our Republic. We need a new kind of progressivism which eliminates the foreign money flowing into our universities, our films, and our tech companies. America must be made American.  

Trump promised to open up the libel laws should he ascend to the presidency. Ironically the libel laws are the sort of thing that’s cleaning up the liars and foreign malefactors who surrounded his presidency. 

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Ultimately truth has not prevailed in these modern day psychodramas.

Witness the foreign weaponization of the unfortunate killing of black men by our sometimes mobbed up, sometimes hapless police departments. 

Yes, there are corrupt police — I am from Boston, after all — but it is also a sort of corruption when foreign actors – the Chinese and Russians – chief among them use crowd funds and flash mobs to destabilize our cities. 

If you criticize these things or merely try to report on them you get mobbed online and sometimes in real life. If you raise reporting objections to these sort of self flagellation that all good thinking people must have you are part of the problem. 

And yet, that conversation needs to be aired. And no Twitter H1-B visa holder ought to be one who decides what American may or may not speak on the Interwebs. 

In the case of my censorship it was Indians who made the call. 

Vijaya Gadde @vijaya

Such an honor to meet @HillaryClinton today. Amazing talk at @Twitter - full of great advice and inspiration!

I wasn’t breaking Twitter’s rules but I had to be suspended. Here’s how CNET.com recounts it:

In a Jan. 16 email, [Indian born] Tina Bhatnagar, the VP of user services, told Dorsey and other executives that the 2015 suspension of right-wing troll Chuck Johnson could provide a precedent for suspending [MILO] Yiannopoulos.

“Per our new enforcement policies, [Yiannopoulos] is consistently in violation but never of direct violence (which is what we perma suspend for). So if we can take the stance to debadge, then why can't we take the stance to perma-suspend?” Bhatnagar wrote. “We perma suspended Chuck Johnson even though it wasn't direct violent threats. It was just a call that the policy team made. He is finding loopholes in policy which is almost worse than the people who blatantly have violations.” 

In a subsequent email, Gadde, the general counsel, also referenced a May 25, 2015, email from Twitter's then-CEO Dick Costolo to the company’s operations team, which suggested the decision to make Johnson’s suspension permanent was made at Costolo’s discretion. "As for Chuck Johnson - Dick made that decision," Gadde wrote before copying the text of Costolo's email to the chain. [Emphasis added].

“To be very clear, I don't want to find out we unsuspended this Chuck Johnson troll later on,” Costolo wrote. “That account is permanently suspended and nobody for no reason may reactivate it. Period. The press is reporting it as temporarily suspended. It is not temporarily suspended it is permanently suspended. I'm not sure why they're mistakenly reporting it as temporarily suspended but that's not the case here...don't let anybody unsuspend it.”

Internal Emails Show Twitter Struggled To Interpret Its Own Verification Rules While Hunting Trolls, by Charlie Warzel, December 19, 2017

“He is finding loopholes in policy which is almost worse than the people who blatantly have violations.” They’ve wounded me so deeply! 

This is what we in the business call “product testing.” 

It’s those same holes in Twitter that I exploited that foreign actors later used to weaponize disinformation and which gave the world Trump, Q Anon, and riots on our streets. 

The problem isn’t censorship but who is doing the censoring and to whom. Of course we should censor human traffickers using WhatsApp to facilitate their slavery. 

If we must be censored let us be censored by Americans. Let us have courts that adjudicate these matters. 

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Social media is always one step away from state control.  And why would it not be? It owes its very beginnings to the state. 

In the case of Facebook the slavemasters and censors are the children and grandchildren of the Eastern European Jewry. In Zuckerberg’s case, he is the mob done good and gone to Harvard; in Sandberg’s case, she is a child of Mossad and may, in fact, be an agent herself, given her lifelong ties to Israeli intelligence.  You can lean in awfully hard when you know you have an intelligence service to protect you. We will get to those topics in a longer post for I believe no other action could account for the behavior. 

To talk about that capture is difficult without eliciting the usual claims of anti-Semitism. We will turn to this topic in a more serious way in the days to come — how Harvard, Yale, and Stanford were captured — and what that means for our supposed Ivy League educated elite but for the moment it’s helpful to understand that the penetration of these institutions by mobsters and their children trying to turn legitimate is one of the defining characteristics of our era.

You are not allowed to talk about that capture of WASP institutions by Jewry even though it is obvious when you begin even a casual examination of the topic. Nor are you allowed to ask if a WASP elite, with all its faults, is, in fact, preferable to a Jewish one, particularly an Eastern European Jewish one. 

This lack of examination of the changing composition of our elite institutions has real consequences. We might ask Jared Kushner, whose father, Charles, stole from his investors and “donated” (read bribed) to Harvard College so his damn fool son could go legit.  Today Kushner is the architect of WinRed where he seeks once more to monopolize a flow of money — this time, of American conservatives. 

During the Trump years Kushner, Zuckerberg, and Shapiro — all Harvard Jews — formed an alliance that explains much of contemporary American life, especially when it comes to Facebook, our most powerful company. 

You can see their alliance as representing what Yuri Slezkine called The Jewish Century. Whereas Claremont represents liberalism, Zuckerberg represents communism (or centralization), Kushner represents capitalism (even in public service he’ll make a buck!) and Shapiro represents Zionism (using Chinese money to pay for a hypnosis machine to own the libs!)  Their fall from power represents the end of the Jewish century and the beginning of something altogether more interesting. 

That alliance is ethnic but also bipartisan, or really unpartisan. While it isn’t as crass as asking “what’s good for the Jews” only a fool would fail to note that these Eastern European Jews ask specifically what’s good for them. Shapiro talks about his bed of money, Kushner shakes down US allies to bail out 666 5th Avenue, and Zuckerberg, well, you know all about Zuckerberg. 

This censorship was obvious to anyone paying attention. You’ll notice it if you watch the flexing.  You might have caught Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s connections to the Israeli compromised Federalist Society or his previous work on the Starr report.  It’s hard to see Joel Kaplan sitting behind Kavanaugh as anything other than a show of force.

Facebook is one world government without any of the governance or gravitas. It’s a menace, in other words. A real autocracy, led by a child dictator, that threatens us all. Facebook is a great threat than Putin, says ex-Trump Russia advisor Fiona Hill. 

And it isn’t only Zuckerberg who is to blame. He is a part of a social network — a network of Eastern European Jewry who took over Harvard.  Mega Democratic donor Dustin Moskovitz is Jewish. So too is Eduardo Saverin, who was quickly jettisoned.  The fourth ever user on Facebook — and Zuckerberg’s roommate — became a rabbi in Israel. 

Key to this alliance is Sheryl Sandberg, rumored to have been former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers’s mistress and confirmed to have been Summers’s subordinate at Treasury, quickly slided into running Facebook once Summers gave Zuckeberg carte blanche to steal Facebook from the Winklevos twins. Summers’s ties and support for the looting of post-Communist Russia are well known. They were the real reason he was ultimately forced from Harvard’s presidency. 

It is Sheryl who made Facebook a business that enriched them all. She leaned in and hoped to wind up in the Hillary Clinton White House. Did she build Facebook with a little help from the Mossad? Almost certainly. 

And as we know the Clinton connections to Mega aka Israeli spy Jeffrey Epstein we might ask if the looting of Russia by Harvard connected Jews was itself a Mossad operation.  We might even ask if the capture of Harvard’s admissions department and the faux claims of meritocracy was itself a Mossad play. 

Sandberg’s father Joel lists one of his favorite movies as Refusenik, a 2007 documentary about the Mossad-Putin plot to export Soviet Jewry to Israel and America.

The history is recounted a bit in The Miami Herald.

The parents were deeply involved in Temple Sinai in North Miami Beach and the effort to free Soviet Jews. In 1982, when Sandberg was 13, she was featured in a Miami Herald article about Soviet Jews. The story noted she had attended her first rally for Soviet Jews when she was a year old: “Since then, she has participated in protest marches, handed out petitions and worked on letter-writing campaigns to help Soviet Jews.” “Sheryl was always motivated, always wanted to have an impact, and that stems from being very active in Soviet Jewry,” says Greenbarg-Albright, who has known Sandberg since elementary school, when they attended a Jewish summer camp in Georgia.

Millions of Russian Jews descended upon America and Israel. They’ve remade both countries in their image and provided much need flow of people and capital. 

So I ask you, did the Soviet Union really fall? Or did it merely get enshrined in code thanks to Yuri Milner’s “investment” in Facebook?

Russian-Israeli Yuri Milner with Mark Zuckerberg

 

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Let us turn social media into a utility. That’s the progressive thing to do.

How would it be progressive? Well, it would free the slaves. Slaves, as Lincoln was fond of reminding us, need not be black. He loved to quote George Fitzhugh, the pro-slavery thinker, who favored extending it to white as well as black.  

By a man’s habit he reveals himself to be a slave. Is it not then a form of slavery to be addicted? Those of us who have served addiction know full well the power it has over us. 

Lincoln has remained a kind of touchstone for me ever since I was a boy. I won the Forbes Museum’s essay contest three out of four years. Coolidge was the subject of my first book. I remain a thorough going yankee, notwithstanding my Western and Southern adventurism. 

Lincoln staffed his administration with his famous “Team of Rivals,” a collection, really, of WASP Republican Whigs, who understood the importance of winning a war and domesticating a frontier with yeoman farmers and middle class homesteaders.

For Coolidge there was no right to strike against the public safety at anytime. Coolidge tangled with the mob. Coolidge staffed his administration with Amherst men, a kind of who’s who of WASP America life. His was the Mellon Administration.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this was the Roaring Twenties – a time of great economic and material prosperity – or that Silent Cal presided over all of it with a kind of Yankee Puritanism. Neocon Amity Shlaes dismisses Garman as a kind of mystic but Garman’s simple Christianity inspired a generation of Amherst men who gave their youth and talents to the country.

“Reason inspired by love of truth is the only eye with which man can see the spiritual heavens above us,” Garman wrote.

This is what I believe, too.

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 I am horrified by the general spirit of lawlessness descending upon this country. The crime numbers are as alarming as they are atrocious.

All Things Considered @npratc

The number of murders in the U.S. jumped by nearly 30% in 2020 compared with the prior year -- the largest ever single-year increase in the country, according to FBI data. There were 21,570 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, which is 4,901 more than in 2019.

n.prFBI Data Shows An Unprecedented Spike In Murders Nationwide In 2020The number of murders in the U.S. rose nearly 30% in 2020 compared with the previous year, according to FBI statistics. It is the largest single-year increase since the record-keeping began.

And to think Trump championed “criminal justice reform.” 

Voter fraud and irregular elections are as old as the Republic. Thomas Edison’s first device was an automatic vote counter. It had no buyers. We Americans prefer to hash it out after the results. Small wonder then that the countries from which most of us are descendants – England and German – prefer a parliamentary system.

Did we really expect the deep state to allow a mobbed up president would be allowed to win reelection?

If Trump was fundamentally a construct, an actor, a reality TV performer we might ask who was doing the script writing and producing. Jared Kushner and Bibi Netanyahu.  

Their mutual friends seemed to prosper enormously during the coronatimes. He shook down our Qatari allies to bail him out of 666 5th Avenue.

Like all mob bosses Trump’s first acts in office speak for themselves. He gutted the IRS and he called for printing loads of money.  

And why is the deep state even a slur? Or the administrative state? Could it be that the deep state is what’s keeping us from total mob rule? 

When we consider Andrew Mellon we might turn to Steve Mnuchin. What sort of Treasury Secretary has business arrangements with admitted Mossad members like Israeli billionaire Arnon Milchan? How should we think about Milchan hiding half a billion dollars offshore? 

Or fights with National Security Council China hand Matt Pottinger over shutting down access to a diseased country so that he and his business interests can remain in power?

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I still believe that in the mob war of the Clinton crime family against the Trumps it was right call to back the Trumps if only because their criminal tendencies appear more amateurish and more obvious. Trump, for all of his many faults, was very clarifying of who sat where. 

There is a certain sense in which Trump had to win to decloak all the criminal syndicates lurking beneath the surface of American life – the Underworld of transnational organized crime. The hidden world that we aren’t allowed to talk about but which we know is there, lurking, stalking, taking, killing. 

Trump’s cabinet was by no means exempt. There’s Elaine Chao and her family favoritism and strange business relationships with the Chinese state. What should we make of Mitch McConnell’s close financial ties to China? 

Then there’s Labor Secretary Alex Acosta’s relationship with the plea deal that released Jeffrey Epstein back in the Bush Administration. Acosta nearly became Trump’s Attorney General. 

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The Biden presidency has clarified things too. 

Other entire health infrastructure is compromised by the Chinese and Jewish pharmaceutical interests who, are exempt from liability thanks to the very mobbed up Ronald Reagan.

We might ask ourselves why our FDA has grown so unable to do real science and we would well learn that that is by design.

Is Pfizer the new Sackler family? Well, they both donated to the American Enterprise Institute and they both employ that alleged pedophile Frank Luntz. Luntz worked for Wexner to sell the Iraq War and he serves as a roommate of sorts to Kevin McCarthy. Kevin works for Big Tech — especially Google and Facebook — and so does Luntz. Why?

Why for all the GOP talk about cracking down on Big Tech is it Biden that’s actually doing it? 

**** 

Monopolies can and have always served the national interest. When Jeff Bezos was working to keep supply lines open Mark Zuckerberg was radicalizing our suggestible citizenry during lockdown – the culmination of which were the Black Lives Matter riots and Q Anon storming of the Capitol.

America isn’t merely an idea; it’s a place and more importantly, it’s a people, or rather a collection of peoples, some of which have the habits of free people and some of which do not. Those who can be made American ought to be free to make their way in this great Republic.

But not at the expense of the Americans already here, who fought and bled and died, so that their prosperity might have something of a home.

I am a part of that Old American network and that, well, that means something. It means being a caretaker, a steward. I’ve become a lot more skeptical of various abstract frames of viewing the world. 

Today we face a new threat – China – and its glaring Singaporization. It seeks to press its people into the service of the state and it seeks to master us. We must gather once more with the remnants of the British Empire to save the world from a mechanistic tyranny. This will require being honest about the world. 

We don’t need the Reaganite Navy. We need synthetic aperture radar and submarines and genetics and facial recognition. 

We need, in other words, the best sort of information technology for the information war.

Or we will lose.