The Prodigy Wars: Child Soldiers and Child Sacrifices in the Modern Politics

Who are the real "groomers" anyway?

Amber Heard: she never stood a chance.

Watching the verdict against Amber Heard earlier this month, I felt a combination of elated and depressed — elated that justice would finally be done and depressed knowing that Amber was herself, in large measure, a victim. She, too, had been groomed. It began early, like all these operations do. She was but a preteen when they got her.

I was also one of those wunderkinds but however wonderful I am now — opinions differ vastly — I am certainly not a kind anymore. Whiz kid sounds a lot better than whiz man and it’s a responsibility of adulthood to take on the burdens.

Keri Kukral @kerikukral

I’m not so concerned about Depp/Heard, rather why Amber Heard was discovered by Greg James Blount as a young teenager. Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyer and bff Leah Saffian trademarked schools for Blount near Mar a Lago (Eagle Arts Academy). Not good.

Alas, the obligation falls to me and those like me who were targeted and processed to break the system once and for all. I won the scholarships.

And, indeed many of the perpetrators of this sort of thing are themselves selected very young.

Once upon a time a 14 year old boy was admitted to an elite college. Here he is pictured in the September 24, 1946 issue of the Chicago Tribune.

Over the years you’d find this or that in the papers about Seid — he was fond of high end cars and was married to Adrienne Gruber in March 1968. He produced operas. Why? Because he could. Or, as he put it, “I’m a successful adult male who gets pleasure out of seeing nice things happen,” he told Sheila Malkind of Tribune in 1987. “I’m not a musician, but I have a talent for running things.”

Indeed. And ruining them.

Seid would go on to fund a gubernatorial run for Steve Baer.

“The bulk of the money he has raised so far came from a $497,850 personal loan from Chicago businessman Barre Seid, president of Trippe Manufacturing Co. The loan to the campaign is among the largest ever received by a candidate for public office in Illinois.” (Ray Gibson, “Edgar out in front in campaign funds,” Chicago Tribune, March 6, 1990)

It wasn’t long before the FEC would put Baer and Barre Seid in their crosshairs though without coming to much of a conclusion. Baer, again financed largely by Barre Seid, ran for governor on the Term Limits and Tax Limits Party but they were disqualified from the ballot because too many petition signatures weren’t verified. Chicago Tribune writer Thomas Hardy claimed that the petition signatures were evidence of overt election fraud.

Seid retreated from public view — he became a Voldemort of sorts — and Baer continued working for Seid at his foundation before striking out on his own. Baer also got involved with selling reverse mortgages after he left politics.

Baer became known for “sending combative and colorful e-mail missives in past months to a who’s-who list of power brokers in the conservative world.” “Baer’s style is to liberally cc and bcc an endless stream of powerful people, and it usually has the effect of getting none of them to listen,” wrote Ryan Grim then of Huffington Post in 2016.

Baer and I played a role in stopping Kevin McCarthy from ascending to the speakership in 2015. I, by publishing material I had about McCarthy’s affair with Renee Ellmers, and he, by relentlessly harassing McCarthy and other journalists to cover it.

Of course the journalists didn’t cover the real reason McCarthy declined to run — something they only hint at ever so obliquely. There are many reasons for this journalistic failure but chief among them was the unwillingness to lose McCarthy as a source.

And McCarthy has been a very good source ever since he, just a boy, was recruited out of the Young America Foundation. (He went to work as chief of staff for Bill Thomas, who now disavows him.)

It’s child soldiers all the way down.

Child soldiers grow up and, with the help of Chinese cash to pay off his wife after his affairs and taxpayer money to help his brother-in-law and Silicon Valley cash for his son, McCarthy seems poisoned to become Speaker of the House yet again.

The Jack Abramoff to his Tom DeLay is none other than Jeff Miller, his longtime friend, and he lives in a home with Frank Luntz, the extremely controversial pollster.

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The late Congressman Walter Jones called me — how he got my number I never did find out — and he asked me if the rumors concerning McCarthy’s marital infidelity were true. I said that they were. He thanked me, wished me well, and then went about stopping McCarthy from becoming speaker. He was a great man and I think of him often, especially his turn against the Iraq War.

For his part Baer called me after the 2020 elections and I told him that I had lost interest in partisan politics. Baer was obsessed with Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) — he is a Catholic and has ten children — and he also claimed that Trump had raped a preteen.

Frankly I found him kind of difficult and more than a little unwell though I wish him well. I reached out to him once more and will likely speak to him this week.

What Seid couldn’t achieve politically he began trying to achieve judicially and journalistically. He swapped out Steve Baer for the more professional Leonard Leo.

Barre Seid would go on to be one of the leading funders of climate change spin. His company’s products — TrippLite — are manufactured in China. He’s donated millions upon millions to conservative causes.

He’d donate so much money that George Mason would name the school not after him, no, but after Antonin Scalia. Seid became one of the top donors to the Federalist Society, which was used to select dozens of federal judges. Leonard Leo also successfully selected shaped Trump’s Department of Justice, too.

I met Seid in his offices in Chicago many years ago with an Israeli spy with me. Seid offered to fund us to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars to do opposition research. I was elated and to some extent it all seemed to good to be true. Perhaps it was.

Things got weird fast. Seid insisted on using code names when we spoke over the phone and even encouraged me to buy a separate phone for communicating solely with him.

He showed me the awards he had gotten from Israeli outfits. I later read that he was awarded an honorary degree by the Israeli university Bar-Ilan for his many works that “fortify Israel’s position in the world.” OK then.

Was he fortifying Israel’s position in the world when he donated millions to Leonard Leo at the Federalist Society? I wonder.

Or when he has donated millions more to opposition research against Democrats on the Senate Judiciary?

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There are, of course, other prodigies that are ultimately pressed into this or that.

I’ve come more or less to believe that the Thiel Foundation’s 20 Under 20 is just such a program. That my friend — Senate candidate Blake Masters — was once the president of the Thiel Foundation has given me pause. Were the Thiel fellows really all that successful or were they selected?

This has, I think, become the prodigy wars. It has, of course, become taboo for nations to use child soldiers but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Just as a nation tries to use up the natural resources of its foes, so, too, does it try to use up its competitor’s human talent on intellectual cul de sacs.

You want your enemy’s smartest minds out of the game entirely, working for some bullshit tech start up or pushing paper at a law or financial firm.

Or you want them working for you, without even knowing it.

(If you get them working for Facebook, you get a twofer.)

The ideal set is up is a dead-ender foreign honeytrap for top minds expecting seven digits of compensation where they do no work. Or what we might call, “Google.”

So with all that in mind, you should read very skeptically books like Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World (2022) by Tyler Cowen and Israeli-American Daniel Gross. Gross’s own life reads as a kind of ne plus ultra example of the strategy employed by Benjamin Netanyahu as part of the binational security state: identify bright young man, help start start up, sell start up into the U.S. (Gross once told me that he had done his national service to Israel by helping to sell Israeli-app Waze to Google. Why he felt he had done his duty went unsaid.)

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel was, I think, it’s fair to say, also one of these early prodigies (at least when it comes to tech) and he was likely recruited by either Gary Kasparov (purportedly KGB) or Rene Girard (French-Chinese intelligence) or possibly both.

A subplot here is that Fischer more or less concluded that Kasparov worked for the KGB. Was Fischer right? Consider that Fischer was himself investigated by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and so was his mother, supposedly for having Soviet ties. They found nothing, of course.

Fischer claimed that Kasparov’s matches were rigged — Fischer called Kasparov a “crook” — and indeed the evidence does point in that direction.

Sacks alone beat Thiel. Was it all a ruse?

In a move that would recall Peter Thiel losing to his business partner David Sacks, Kasparov lost a chess game to Sharansky.

Here’s how it was explained on October 15, 1996.

Kasparov dispatched most of the rest of his rivals within the hour, winning 18 times, conceding twice and tying four games. He then stormed out of the room without talking to reporters.

Sharansky, who is not a grand master but is regarded as a strong amateur player, emigrated to Israel in 1986.

On Monday, Kasparov and Sharansky had met on less competitive ground at Sharansky’s office, exchanging Russian greetings and a warm hug.

Kasparov, who is partly of Jewish ancestry, said he was in Israel to establish a chess academy.

``I think it’s very helpful for kids to see a better future .. and learn qualities like self-discipline, logic and responsibility,″ he said.

When it came to youthful recruiting Kasparov knew of what he spoke.

Kasparov himself was a part of Communist Party. He was elected to the Central Committee of Komsomol in 1987. Komsomol later played a key role in the looting of Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union.

Kamil Galeev @kamilkazani

How did Khodorkovsky get so rich? This story reflects the origins of many oligarchic fortunes. Khodorkovsky was the chief of local NТТМ - Office for Scientific and Technological Initiatives of the Youth. NTTM was a department of Komsomol - the youth branch of the Communist Party

We’ve already explored Natan Sharansky, Likud and their ties to Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg.

I have met Kasparov a handful of times and for what it’s worth I suspect Kasparov is Russian-Israeli aligned. Kasparov is on the board of the Human Rights Foundation, whose head Thor Halvorssen was close to the NXIVM cult and drawn into the Mueller Report. And, of course, Kasparov worked for Yuri Milner whose ties to both Russian and Israeli intelligence community are well known and well understood.

Peter told me that he was saddened that he lost the friendship with Kasparov after Trump got elected. I’m not totally sure I believe him. I think it began way earlier.

I’d love to know what really happened with the book that Thiel, Kasparov and Levin were all writing. Wouldn’t you like to read it? The book never came out because, according to Levchin, they couldn’t agree on prescriptions.

Bonnie Kavoussi @bkavoussi

I would have enjoyed reading this book by Garry Kasparov, Max Levchin, and Peter Thiel on reviving technological innovation. It never got published. goodreads.com/book/show/1142…

The question for Peter (and the rest of the PayPal mafia) is do they want to break the wheel?

Now we can’t go back and fix our screwed up childhoods but we can change the way these processes operate going forward. We can change them for our daughters or sons.

We shall turn in more detail to the Federalist Society in another post but for now I think it’s safe to say that one ought to be very skeptical of joining any group whilst remaining cognizant that groups (or associations in Tocqueville’s parlance) are precisely what’s important to rising.

Is anyone on our side taking care of our elite minds? Or are we throwing them all to the wolves?

This matters because it contorts the sort of society we live in when powerful people warp what even is our elite.

Chua and Rubenfeld: Portrait of a Chisraeli couple

I had first heard the rumors about Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rubenfeld throwing not appropriate parties in 2011. I weighed exposing it

To be honest I didn't believe the rumors then but I do believe them now that Rubenfeld was placed on leave for sexual harassment.

I wondered then and I wonder now: Why is a woman with such a thin resume at Yale and the nexus for all the federal clerkships?

We tell all kinds of lies for our children and create all kind of stories about why their success is deserved. Amy Chua just takes it to a cartoonish extreme. And who am I to judge? She succeeded in getting her eldest daughter a Supreme clerkship.

Of course there’s a deeper question here: where is the line between mentoring and grooming after all? Or recruitment?

J.D. Vance: From Chua’s book party to the U.S. Senate?

And yet there is another future — a future where the wunderkinds can throw off the yoke of their predators before they, too, go to a dark place.

It’s not too late. We can break the blackmail cycle. It’s never too late. Yesterday’s villain can be tomorrow’s hero. So why not start today?