My Old Mentor Writes In...
Responding to a clout chasing ex-girlfriend, Biden's magnificence in the Middle East, and a few thoughts on the Dutch
One of the most rewarding things from running this Substack is how many lovely people write to me to tell me how much my writing has changed their perspective, their approach or even their lives. To say that this means the world to me seems trite but it doesn’t make it any less true. I even enjoy sparring with some of my detractors though the best debates are public.
This Substack is read by billionaires, politicians and their staff, my high school teachers, my parents, my priest and all the people I have collected as I’ve made my way through life. Having been censored on Twitter and elsewhere I ask only that my views get the hearings that they deserve. I will never go back to self-censorship come what may. I’ve lost friends, girlfriends and even family for saying what I know to be true. Nothing in life is without its cost. I hope for a reconciliation with anyone and everyone but on shared terms not dictated ones. I want to live in the world I imagine. In the end this is all that matters. So feel free to steal my views.
My correspondence has gotten voluminous over the years and though I try to keep up with all of it I find that I cannot. (I make priority for the paid subscribers but even that has proven challenging as we slowly get to larger and larger numbers. You should still be a paid subscriber, dear reader.)
Still I read every email from my mentors. My responses are in italics and I have edited it slightly here and there.
Saw your (re)tweet about Tina. Awful stuff.
Thank you. My high school ex-girlfriend has decided to publish a book which makes a number of factually inaccurate claims about me, my associations and my family. I’ve addressed a lot of her fabrications elsewhere and her history of mental illness is well documented. It is a little weird to address a relationship I had when I was a teenager. As the relationship began when I was a minor I find it particularly disgusting.
This is clout chasing par excellence. I broke up with her after I found out she had been serially cheating on me, an experience I found deeply traumatizing at the time as I was in love with her. After we broke up she proceeded to be obsessed with me and to spread rumors at our small college. When I replied and said that she was dishonest she accused me of sexually assaulting her over a year and half after I had broken up with her and with weeks to go until graduation. I was acquitted on all counts and she actually sent me a voicemail apologizing for lying about the experience, which incredibly I kept. (Never throw anything away! Never throw anything away!)
I brushed it off and have given her a wide berth as one does when one is confronted with someone who is genuinely not well and who has a passing familiarity with integrity or reality. Over the years I have learned that she has a history of both plagiarism and fabrication. She was fired from at least one job for lying about her qualifications. Naturally I was confronted by a “fact checker” with a series of deeply personal questions about my family, my childhood, and my professional associations. I fear the worst from a dishonest ex-girlfriend I’d like to keep in the far past.
Her publisher is Simon and Schuster and I’m going to read the book but so far it doesn’t look good. I’ve asked for a review copy but so far no luck.
I am likely going to pursue her, Simon and Schuster, its subsidiary publisher, KKR, and Puck News — all of which are sort of a Chisraeli disinformation targeting me — in federal court. (I understand that KKR has been swept by U.S. and British intelligence.) Any serious fact checker or publisher wouldn’t have given her the time of day.
As you know I’ve held these kind of disinformation operations aren’t really journalistic operations as they’re understood. I sued BuzzFeed News/Huffington Post all the way to the Supreme Court and worked with Thiel to bankrupt Gawker, backed as it was by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.
Arguably it’s my duty to expose a lot of this sort of thing so that others aren’t victimized. I was advised earlier in my life not to sue but I think this was the counsel of darkness. We don’t have anything if we don’t have our reputation.
Incidentally the experience of being lied about publicly has made me a lot more empathetic so it’s not been without its benefits and I candidly don’t really want to associate with anyone whose level of due diligence is a Google search.
The purpose is to isolate me socially and to make associating with me difficult. It’s a kind of network attack but as the powers that be around the attacks on me start to lose power it loses its efficacy. Hence the ex-girlfriend trying to fabricate new charges against me.
But as Pat Benatar said, “Hit me with your best shot.”
****
Saw this article about anti-loneliness clubs. Maybe you can start one in DC. Your tweets are filled with loneliness.
I would never join a club which would have me as a member. There’s no denying that I live a lonely life but it’s also true that I live a deeply meaningful one. I didn’t have the best childhood growing up and I try to rush through the holiday season as fast as I can. I find that the work, which I love, makes for lonely living but then again who said life had to be filled with endless joy? Maybe we should be striving more for meaning and dignity than happiness.
Besides, America is a lonely country as you know well with your foreign-born wife. Would I like a wife who “got it”? Who loved me unconditionally (as if such a thing were possible)? Sure I would but greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. I see it as a great privilege to spend my life pledging my life, building my fortune and co-signing my sacred honor in defense of a country I love more than anything else. I’ve been meaning to write about the lonely ladies and divorced dads of the deep state for quite sometime who have nothing but the greatest country the world has ever seen. I suppose you could consider me in their company and so I know that however lonely I feel, my brothers and sisters are keeping the watch alongside me. It’s more than enough. I found my family in the long night discussions about what the policies should be in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the early morning recruitment of an asset, or all day every day building of the machinery of freedom.
All that said, ladies, you know where to find me…
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I remain optimistic about Israel Hamas. It is obvious that Biden forced the truce on the Israeli's and facilitated the hostage exchange. If he did it once, he can do it again. I think there is an opening for a broader settlement. But obvious danger in that. I think that Jimmy Carter was committed to a broad settlement in his second term. Interesting how the neo conservatives and a portion of the Jewish vote and money switched to Reagan. I also remain convinced that Bill Clinton planned something big for the last two years of his administration. And we all know how that played out. The Lewinsky affair paralyzed him.
I suspect Biden knows that. But if he can pull this off, he will deserve reelection. BTW I don't put much stock in the polls. He remains in a strong position.
President Joe Biden is the Man in the Arena which Teddy Roosevelt wrote about. If America is to have any soul,
“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twister pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities — all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.”
Biden may well lose — who knows? — but at least he stood up for one last run, one last go, one last ride. Yes, he is old. He is eighty-one. His heart may fail. His body may give out. Nothing is written, we know. But his will remains — and yes, that’s enough, more than enough.
I think often of the sort of punishment this man endured — his wife and daughter and his favored son all dead — and how he manages to keep going. His remaining son and daughter have both been targeted by Israeli psyops but the Biden family keeps trucking along. They never complain. They never ask for sympathy. It’s never even about them. They keep on. Defiant, workmanlike.
Of course I am impressed. Of course I would want in on that. I think it’s as magical as it is familiar. Each of us has that capacity in us — to never give up, to keep going.
Yes, there’s something Christlike about it and I don’t think it’s a surprise that Joe Biden is among our most Christian presidents.
I suspect there’s a lot of Americans like this — flawed, conventionally counted out who are just waiting for their moment and who, in seizing it, deliver a masterly performance. They don’t go to the right schools, they don’t have the right eloquence, their wives or husbands aren’t anything to write home about, their kids aren’t very impressive but they have in them a kind of quiet greatness which the Almighty can summon in them for His own plan. In this way, I think Providence guides America.
Early on I think Donald Trump was a bit this way, too, but he failed to take care of his people as evinced by January 6th. I think Donald Trump remains a good man but Joe Biden is a great man.
I’m particularly impressed with Biden’s ability to take real pain. Bill Clinton may have been able to feel your pain but Joe Biden can absorb it and turn it into hope. Bill Clinton may have been from Hope but Joe Biden knows how to deliver hope.
I liked Bill Clinton pardoning of CIA asset Marc Rich as his final fuck you to Netanyahu but Joe Biden’s embrace of the Israeli families while sanctioning the settlers might have been the moment that Likud finally broke.
I think Joe Biden is wrong on Israel and he has allowed a lot of misbehavior in this country but he is not alone in wishing the Israelis were our friends rather than a relic of a darker time. There’s work President Biden will leave to his political heirs. Eighty-one year olds aren’t known to live for forever, after all. Stack up the accomplishments and they are considerable.
So the polls are soft around Biden? So what? I think we ask a lot from our leaders. Sometimes it’s enough that they endure. That they keep the flag flying and the government clean and running. And so far, Joe Biden has.
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Really stunning to see what the Hamas attack on October 7th has caused. It has effectively ended the Ukraine War. It has given Biden an opening to push for a settlement. It magnified the political explosion in the Netherlands.
You kind of got that one wrong. As I recall, you tweeted the day after the Rutte Cabinet fell that he would be returned with a larger majority. Rutte announced he would not head the VVD/liberals two days later. And his party lost ten seats.
Wilder's party rocketed to the top, definitely helped by the massive and even violent demonstrations of Middle Eastern immigrants in favor of Hamas after October 7th.
Rutte's coalition lost 37 seats, out of 77.
Two Middle class parties - NSC and the Farmers -won 27.
It was truly a revolution from the middle.
Dutch society has deep roots which bring stability to its politics. I would could the Dutch deep state as a part of that, even if not a very important part.
It looks like Rutte is going to NATO. Where the negotiations for a new government will go, is anyone's guess.
Tweed jackets and Fair Isles Sweater weather is here. I love it.
Yes, I got it wrong. I misjudged Prime Minister Rutte. I think, like a lot of our so-called leaders, he collapsed under pressure of migration and what it might mean for the Dutch. Clearview is barred in The Netherlands and you can tell how serious a country is about migration by its response to Clearview. Britain, for her part, seems to want to control the facial recognition company.
Our Dutch friends are dealing with the reality that a Chisraeli world no longer works. Rather than make necessary reforms — stabilizing Africa or the Middle East — they’re lashing out either by doubling down on failed migration politics with a Kurdish-born leader or through the goofy hair silly Dutchman of mixed Indonesian ancestry.
I often ask people where they’d rather live — Amsterdam or London. The Netherlands’s beautiful but she isn’t serious. She was the sort of middleman between the global oligarchy and the Western democracy. To be a trader sometimes makes you a traitor. Witness the country’s largest shipbuilder suing over the Russian sanctions.
Bob Shillman put up the money for Geert Wilders. I congratulated Shillman on his victory but I do think it’ll be short lived. Wilders is a dilettante, not a prime minister, and Shillman has likely earned the ire of Mi-6 over his funding of Tommy Robinson and now the Dutch intelligence services over his support of Wilders.
The Dutch deep state will find as the French deep state and the British deep state — your only hope is America. Time to work with us, old friends.
We’ve missed you. Now about your Nazi-loving prince…