The GOP Great Turning? Why There'll Be No Hunter Biden Congressional Investigations And No Real Governing Majority
A quick poking around the stupid approaches of the Murdoch empire
Welcome new readers!
We’ve hitherto explored the degree to which Indian intelligence controlled Twitter before Elon Musk, controlled by China, bought the social media network. We looked into how British intelligence (Nick Clegg) took Facebook away from Sheryl Sandberg, a daughter of Likud.
We’ve also pointed out the rather obvious fact pattern which leads us to conclude that Hunter Biden is a federal informant and as such won’t be getting into any trouble for all the cretins who had erstwhile surrounded him. Frankly I’d like to thank Hunter for his service, especially in the cause of arresting Chinese spy Patrick Ho. No, it’s not hard to see Wesley Clark Jr. of American Psyop fame in the chaotic op that was run against Hunter Biden. Nor, if I’m honest and squint a little, is it hard for me to see myself. Yes, I, too, have been subjected to psychological warfare by foreign powers and I know how dastardly it can get. Believe me. I didn’t get to GenX levels of craziness.
Repeat after me: You don’t get to do that much blow and that much cocaine without Uncle Sam picking up at least some of the bill.
The recent revelations that Twitter executives chatted with, and sought support from, federal law enforcement and the Biden campaign for their censoring actions during the 2020 election is altogether unsurprising. My frenemy Tim Miller gets this exactly right in his crudely titled piece describing what’s up with this Hunter Biden nontroversy.
Conservatives are seemingly justified, though, in pointing out that the hack and leak operation targeting Hunter wasn’t “Russian intelligence” but, alas, conservatives are limited in their ability to openly discuss the role of Israeli intelligence in our political affairs because nearly every congressional Republican is to some extent compromised by their slavish support for Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel.
Don’t expect Republicans to point out the obvious — that Israeli intelligence was targeting Hunter Biden as a means of exacting leverage on then Vice President Joe Biden who was working with our deep state to drag Ukraine’s government away from the kleptocrats who have since decamped for Israel or the UAE. The Israelis have long used Ukraine’s nonexistent approach to international law as a way of financing their European operations. Trump’s willingness to intervene in Ukraine at the behest of Likud actors is what ultimately led to his first impeachment. Just what exactly Kash Patel or Jon Solomon had to do with Ukraine is anyone’s guess.)
And who is this Yoel Roth anyway? He was, until recently, Twitter’s Trust & Safety head. He’s gay and Jewish — not that there’s anything wrong with that!
Roth, who hails from Boca Raton, Florida and attended Swarthmore College and University of Pennsylvania (where he did the Grindr PhD), worked very closely with the Anti-Defamation League, which is a front for Israeli intelligence. You’ll recall that Twitter has had all manner of countries involved in placing spies within its ranks.
The ADL is close to what we might call the Israeli deep state and doesn’t care for the Likudnik-types congregating and organizing on Twitter and running assets in the DMs. Naturally it pressures Twitter to censor various characters — to shut it down as it were. If you don’t censor who it wants you to censor you get branded anti-Semitic and they take away your ad revenue. Musk is turning to Chinese-compromised companies and to subscriptions to fill the gap. Will he succeed? I suspect, given the ability of the Chinese and other actors to move money semi-legally through fake credit cards that he will — at least on this part of the operation.
For now the efforts are underway to remove the soft, quiet coup that has already taken place. Neil McCabe’s son, for example, works as SpaceX’s FBI liaison. Like are we really not supposed to notice that the only lawyer remaining at Twitter is James Baker, the ex-FBI law implicated in the Fusion GPS scandal? Or that the FBI itself hasn’t been massively compromised over the years by foreign intelligences? By making the Hunter Biden hack and leak a “Russian” op rather than an Israeli or Chinese one, we didn’t have to have the difficult conversations about what was happening to our tech sector. We could just scapegoat the Russians — naughty and nasty and notorious though they are — and move along. Sanction them! Punish them! But certainly don’t ask the questions about who else might be involved in setting them up.
Or put another way…
The reason Musk could fire so many people at Twitter is that so many of them are spies. But for whom do they spy?
What we are witnessing is a seismic shift in how the Republican Party operates and how seemingly unprepared it is for the moment in which it finds itself. In normal countries when a party fails to win the seats it expects in an election its leadership rightly resigns in disgrace but America is not a normal country. We don’t do shame here. No sir.
Part of the problem is that so many Republicans have campaigned in and grown up in, an environment of low interest rates. They are altogether unable to understand how higher interest rates affect and afflict their diverse coalition. High interest rates all but eviscerate the tech communities that had shown themselves friendly to the GOP cause. Oil is becoming politically incorrect as both an investment and a cause while construction is decreasing in a world of slumping housing sales. The commercial real estate barons who backed Trump are hurting too with everyone working from home. So too are the casino magnates who are either dead or under counterintelligence review. Who are the GOP’s new donors? Are we really going back to the hedge funders who proved so incapable of getting Romney-Ryan elected? What is the “agenda” exactly that Paul Ryan says Kevin McCarthy is continuing? You don’t get a red wave when you don’t have a lot of green backing you and the money was seemingly turned off for the Republicans after January 6, 2021.
I think it’s now dawning on Republicans just how narrow their margin really is.
If Republicans (or Democrats) can’t be trusted to hit McCarthy on his familial corruption, ties to Chinese, Israeli and other foreign intelligence, and general stupidity, we might as well get ready for his speakership.
My suspicion is that McCarthy’s sizable corruption investigations will go the way that Joe Manchin’s did — it’ll be totally disappeared if he votes the right way — and McCarthy will get turned and do whatever the U.S. intelligence community wants. McCarthy’s ability to walk a fine line between K street and Langley will be interesting to watch. McCarthy’s corruption is legion. Will the Deep State threaten him into being a good boy? Is Joe Biden (or his team) really that talented?
It’s tough to say but I suspect very possible, maybe even probable. I’d look for whether or not McCarthy joins the efforts at permitting reform, the case for which was expertly laid out in McConnell Bristol’s “The Case for Permitting Reform.”
The current American permitting bureaucracy is unacceptably complex and comes at the expense of bold new energy development. The bulk of the permitting process is dictated by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a 1970 law that sets standards for environmental review on all new development in the United States. For small projects, these environmental reviews can take months and thousands of dollars to complete. And the kind of major development envisioned by the IRA would likely take four and a half years across all federal agencies and cost millions of dollars. One notoriously slow agency, the Federal Highway Administration, has an average review time of 8.6 years. All of this must take place before a single shovel hits the ground.
In addition to environmental review, another part of the permitting regime in desperate need of reform is the regional input process, which lends itself to abuse by local communities reflexively opposed to development. Under current rules, nearby landowners have exhaustive powers to demand additional costly review and even pursue legal challenges to new projects, further complicating an already cumbersome process. Considering the resulting costs—in both time and money—associated with these projects, clean energy developers and investors are actively discouraged from building the exact infrastructure that the nation’s energy transition hinges on. In terms of technology, incentives, and public opinion, the United States is ready for its energy transition, but outdated government policy is standing in the way.
Permitting reform is the next necessary bipartisan priority now that the CHIPS Act has been passed. The economics now support carbon neutral technology rather than dirty fossil fuels.
Changing the permitting for clean tech, though, is a tall order for Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise who hail entirely from congressional district that are essentially oil fiefdoms. For many of our allies it’s essential that America join the climate fight. I expect a lot of our allies to leak their oppo files on McCarthy and in truth, I know that these efforts have already begun. Watch closely for some excitement.
What we really need is a young Republican to offer another vision for where the Party will go. There are many places for the Grand Old Party to go — to crack down on foreign influence peddling, perhaps — and for it to keep its bona fides. Be wary of those who force us to choose McCarthy without a real debate over the future of the party or the country.
Patriotic Republicans would be wise to study coalition politics that have existed elsewhere at the state level, like in Alaska where a bipartisan majority coalition was just announced.
Can we come together again? I’d like to think that we can but then I’m not in politics, at least not exactly.
I read this and thought I'd turn to my chief Jerusalem bureau chief for thoughts: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/08/us/politics/spyware-nso-pegasus-paragon.html
Anything you want to add?