When You're The Help: MAGA Opportunists, David Frum, Weird Half-Jews and Other Parvenus
Tina Nguyen and I haven’t spoken since 2011 when she falsely accused me of sexual misconduct. In her latest book she attempts to smear me once again — but this time for clout and relevance.
“It’s a cycle that just keeps happening and happening. And man, it’s been an interesting process going through all these interviews for the book because sometimes I face this wall of disbelief that the things I say are true and are happening…” — Tina Nguyen to Reed Galen of the Lincoln Project. Galen worked alongside, John Weaver, one of the largest sexual harasser of our time, and a registered agent of the Russian Federation.
Whenever there’s a conversion there’s always the question of how sincere it is. Most conversions are done for gain, either in the hereafter or, more precisely, in the here and now. But sometimes it’s just naked opportunism. This is especially common with immigrants who social climb around perceived power. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself climbed all over.
So it is with my ex-girlfriend, Tina Nguyen, who at the tender age of 34, published a memoir about, among other things, yours truly and how I triggered her ascent into right-wing politics.
You see, dear reader, I dated Ms. Nguyen in high school and for a few minutes in college. I know, I know, my high school love interests aren’t necessarily of interest to anyone, myself included, but we must ask:
So why is it that so much of the pro-Israel media finds it so enthralling?
Could it be because I have gone on to invest in technology companies — genetics, facial recognition, satellites, and submarines — which strengthen America while excluding Israel whose conduct in Gaza and elsewhere is now plain to see?
Could the sustained defamation campaign against me and my allies be an Israeli-flavored part of the transnational repression we read about targeting American citizens of Chinese or Russian descent?
Well the evidence has come out that Israel’s Defence Forces are manipulating public discourse and targeting anyone who opposes them. You can even read about it in Haaretz. What started with the Palestinians has now included the sons and daughters of the American deep state who have been systematically purged. That, of course, includes me who was dubbed a “white nationalist” for starting genetics companies.
The Israeli state has made genetic tests illegal. In fact DNA testing in Israel is not only illegal it’s illegal to show the results of a DNA test or talk about it if you got the DNA test anywhere else in the world. Israelis who have pushed back on this censorship have been called — you guessed it! — “Nazis”!
I sued the Huffington Post — where Tina’s Israeli co-handler old boss Danielle Frum curiously recommended Tina Nguyen work — and bankrupted them, along with BuzzFeed News, which had purchased them. I sued all the way to the Supreme Court, of course, and lost because well, the Supreme Court has its compromised problems too.
Naturally Arianna Huffington was a frequent dinner companion of the Family Frum. Tina, ever the social climber, tells us as much.
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I remember that high school relationship I remember it a little differently — and I have the receipts.
I didn’t return to Massachusetts not because I wanted to control her but because I couldn’t afford going home for the holidays.
I am a cofounder of Clearview.AI and how would Tina even know if I was or not? I haven’t spoken to her since 2011! Clearview was founded in 2016!
I exposed the Israeli denigration attack by Rolling Stone against University of Virginia during the fake rape of Jackie Coakley. By the way Tina has her own history of false rape accusations. When you understand that Charlottesville is where we train a lot of our future intelligence professionals you understand that the fake rape charge and the fight over the Confederate statues are much the same op.
I stopped writing for conservative publications because I was disgusted by what they had become particularly in their defense of Israeli policies. My work on Senator Menendez has led him to being indicted twice.
There’s a lot of things missing from the book. Just a few quick details:
how she falsely accused me of sexual assault two years after I broke up with her for cheating on me and after I won the journalistic award she had competed for and failed to get.
how she (and her mother) used me for my connections and grew resentful when I didn’t give her everything she wanted.
how she called me a “faggot” for not opposing Obama more. She claimed in an interview that I outed an openly gay student at Claremont but in reality, I showed that he was censoring Christian students in the wake of Proposition 8.
Normally I wouldn’t bother replying to such attacks — the attacks, they come and they go — but I do think it’s worthwhile to point out how a social climber can hijack a movement to her own ends.
The truth is that I have been deeply scarred by my own dalliances with the conservative world and I am reminded of that scarring whenever I read my press clippings, which my Israeli friends are only too happy to trot out whenever it looks like I might escape from the bucket of crabs I find myself in. I’ve weighed in on this before elsewhere.
Here’s the TLDR: I won a scholarship to an elite Boston prep school when I was 14. I excelled there but didn’t end up going to an Ivy League school. I was rather traumatized by my experience there and went to the best college I could get into the furthest from home which gave me the most money — Claremont McKenna College.
I helped my girlfriend Tina Nguyen go to Claremont McKenna College and then to graduate essentially debt-free. She went to Claremont, proceeded to cheat on me and then I broke up with her.
She can’t let it go because it is professionally advantageous for her to pretend we had something more involved than we did.
Whenever I meet a convert I ask the obvious question: “what have you given up for your new faith?”
I’d argue you don’t really love anything if you haven’t sacrificed for it, if you haven’t really fought for it. In the end the greats are known for how much pain they can endure. Life has taught me that I can endure plenty. There are many moments when I have thought I was down only to see the calvary arrive.
Whenever you’re attacked in public — and I’ve had my share though I never quite expected my high school girlfriend to be among them — these attacks serve to remind you of your own humanity and give you pause for reflection.
Am I being attacked because of what I actually did?
When you defend the vulnerable you will yourself become vulnerable. I’ve come to believe that injustice anywhere is ultimately a threat to justice everywhere. I’ve come to believe that Mandela was right — about apartheid, about Palestine, and about the need for a truth and reconciliation committee.
We should have one in America, too, starting with all those responsible for the wars we fought for other countries.
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As the information war heats up we are reminded of the degree to which foreign governments often influence our American discourse and democracy. Book publishing is just such a venture and fortunately we have FTC chairwoman Lina Khan blocking a merger between Simon & Schuster and Random House to make this kind of thing impossible in the future. KKR, the private equity firm which owns Simon & Schuster, is effectively under new management.
All of which is to say that it’s doubtful that such a weird book would be greenlit today.
Whenever you read a book you ought to ask yourself, “Whose interest does this serve?”
A few relevant sections of Tina’s book makes this all too obvious.
Her attacks on me are altogether identical to other Israeli attacks on me and it’s telling that Tina found refuge from Conservatism Inc. working for Dan Abrams, whose father Floyd Abrams, married an Israeli, later represented Clearview.AI unsuccessfully.
If I wasn't a cofounder of Clearview.AI why then was I given founder’s shares?
My criticism of Clearview.AI isn’t that it’s selling the technology to government but that it’s not involving the public.
I wasn’t screwed over by Thiel but I whistle blew against Founders Fund and Thiel’s concerning ties to the Russian world. Founders Fund is now collapsing and the FBI agreed with me, assessing foreign compromised billionaires as a threat to national security.
The attacks are also quite similar to those bandied against me by David Frum, the Bush speechwriter who gave us the “axis of evil” speech. Frum was fired from the NSC for moonlighting as an Israeli asset. Frum found work, if you can call it that, at the very neoconservative American Enterprise Institute where they too tired of him. From there he went to The Atlantic, where Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg edits him to this day.
I’ve had my own brushes with The Atlantic as the Thiel piece with Barton Gellman makes clear and I am very distrustful of their proprietor, Laurene Powell Jobs, who was a close associate of one Ghislaine Maxwell, the gal pal to Jeffrey Epstein. At best Mrs. Jobs is paying a bribe to the Israeli world through the Atlantic. At worst she’s complicit in their calumny.
Frum likes to run young women as assets — in my time these have included Katie McHugh, Rosie Gray, and now Tina Nguyen — and he grooms them into serving as his mouthpieces just as readily as anyone else in the conservative movement. He even employs them as babysitters if Tina’s experience is any consolation.
In a way, Frum had hoped that his protégé — Rosie Gray — might have written this book but she’s disappeared from public view. Perhaps Gray’s ties to BuzzFeed proved to be too much, especially now that BuzzFeed is no more. Gray was upset with me when I broke the story about how Cory Booker was likely being blackmailed by the Israeli world over how he didn't live in Newark and was gay.
Puck News is the new BuzzFeed, alas. The corporate structure is quite different. The VC model having given way to the partner model. Tina is a partner there and so, too, is Julia Ioffe who has pedaled the Israeli line on Ukraine, and Teddy Schleifer whose ethics have long been called into question as he covers the tech world.
You can watch Frum interview Shimon Peres in Toronto in 2012 here.
Frum was very close to Mytheos Holt, who wrote his thesis about Frum and who Tina later dated and protects with a pseudonym of “Maxwell,” and who wrote that, “I tried to befriend a white nationalist” for the Israeli-backed Federalist publication. (The very pro-Likud Barre Seid, who gave Leonard Leo $1.6B, was a donor.)
Holt — along with my Clearview cofounder Hoan Ton-That — was a guest of mine at the 2016 RNC convention at my AirBNB. You can actually hear Mytheos singing a racist ode to me in the France 24 interview while Hoan strums the guitar. It was weird even for me but then Holt so often was weird.
Unbeknownst to me Holt was involved in an underground sex scene in Washington D.C — leather, whips, chains, the whole gamut. In truth the operation seems to have been a blackmail factory. A friend of mine once saw him seated at a seedy DC strip club — alone, in a three piece suit — eating spaghetti with a fork and knife — an image that has made it hard to enjoy spaghetti ever since.
He was also very close to Lauren Southern who he seems to have handled. He’s since absconded to Hollywood after serving as a lobbyist for the compromised bits of the tech industry at R Street Institute where Frum served as vice chairman.
In fact Holt introduced me to Frum who asked Mytheos if my information sources were “HUMINT or SIGINT” — a disturbing question about what it suggested about Frum.
Frum proceeded to regale me with how Trump would loss the 2016 election and predicted that Trump would want to stop the steal.
I bet Frum a $1000 that Trump would win and he never paid up.
Year later I’ve wondered if Frum was the left-wing version of the Likud operation that later became the real Stop The Steal movement and culminated in the very Israeli January 6th attacks on democracy.
Sure enough, Frum plunged headlong into #RussiaGate, itself now universally acknowledged as a kind of cover up for the Israeli involvement in helping Trump get elected. Curious stuff indeed.
January 6th forced me from the conservative world I had already distrusted. I became an apostate. Despite no evidence for my alleged Holocaust denial I was made into a denier all the same. First the defamation, next the looting from me of my companies and assets. At the time I was too depressed over the collapse of my marriage to do much about it.
But whereas I broke from the conservative Israeli influencer world Tina ran headlong into its liberal analogue. I don’t blame her for doing that. She was always a social climber but social climbing isn’t for me. I prefer to focus on the things which really matter.
As her book tour makes all too clear she will do and say everything and anything for content. The writer Arthur Bloom goes into this sort of thing in greater detail than I ever could and here I hope he will permit to quote him at length:
This is the book of an anxious woman who feels trapped and feels the need to explain herself. But it’s a misconception about memoir-writing that just because you’re writing about yourself, you are excused from learning about the people you’ve been involved with, and really, if you want to do it well, you have to try and give them a fair hearing. That’s the test Tina fails too many times here.
It’s not her fault. If she were honest, the Israelis would hurt her, too. Tina Nguyen has decided the safe thing to do, despite the chaos in Israel and multiple indictments of Israeli spies over the last year, is to describe anyone talking about it as shrieking about Jews. I am sorry to put it this way and it will offend some people, but there is a very Asian striver sensibility and status-consciousness on display here.
There are all sorts of benefits to being friends with David Frum, with whom she is speaking tomorrow at Politics and Prose, but only if you toe the line. And the line of David Frum, that consummate unpatriotic dual loyalist, is not America’s. This is a book about getting out of the right, but if she’s still in his orbit, can she really say she has?
…
Another recurring figure in this book … is Charles Johnson. She knew him as “Charlie,” when he was her high school boyfriend, and later he becomes “Chuck.” I can see why she feels the need to explain this relationship. Charles is a colorful figure.
Tina more or less has learned to think what her colleagues in the New York media think about Charles, though many of them have worked with him as a source, and it is now a documented fact that he was a federal informant. The Israelis don’t want you to think it’s OK to talk to him. In fact, for talking to him and sussing some of this out, they leaned on Neil Patel to get him not to re-hire me a few years ago, which is very typical of their sort of blackballing. I’m tempted to make a joke that after letting them into the clubs, this is what they start to do. At a certain point we need publishers who are willing to stand up to it.
Let’s just go over some of Tina’s basic claims about Charles, some of which she is clinging to after they have become untenable. She brings up the Bob Menendez controversy about the Dominican child hookers, from about a decade ago. She says, uncritically, that Charles was fed that story by Cuban counterintelligence, which was the spin of Menendez himself at the time, and all the Israeli-aligned reporters accepted it. Given that Menendez was charged with corruption this year, it might be cause for a little more open-mindedness.
Tina is, in other words, not very good at this. She presents no evidence for the claim, which is quite a serious one, that the Russians “would feed [Johnson] intel meant to destabilize trust in American institutions.” In fact, it appears to be him who persuaded Peter Thiel to become an FBI informant on the Russians. Johnson is rendered here as Thiel’s “hatchet man,” and being the one who hooked Thiel up with a group of far-right guys for that dinner in Cleveland in 2016. It was actually someone else, and I’m curious why he hasn’t showed up in some of these stories yet.
Tina exhibits a basic lack of familiarity with business that can be attractive in a woman but is unbecoming in a reporter. She doesn’t seem to know what angel investing is, and describes the PayPal mafia as comprised of programmers, which is not really true. You can read her account of the Clearview AI situation if you care how Tina felt about it, but it won’t help you understand it in any way. The technology certainly raises a lot of ethical and cultural questions, but it’s not really accurate to call it, strictly speaking, a “privacy-smashing technology.” There’s now a whole book about this company. Maybe Tina should read it. She ends this chapter quoting one of Charles’s fairly recent blog posts, before doing a WASP impression: “Poor boy, I thought, despite myself.”
Poor girl, I’m afraid.
The post which Bloom is alluding is this one where I exposed the Israeli spy connections of one Sheryl Sandberg.
I took especial pleasure that the very week Tina’s book came out Sheryl Sandberg finally left Facebook’s board after a series of adverse rulings about her conduct. (I had previously helped force Thiel off the board before that.)
Of course I helped build Clearview to set right the capture of Harvard by Likud — Jeffrey Epstein had an office there and Larry Summers is still respected in its halls. Things are changing. Epstein is dead and Summers is on the board of Open AI, which both the DOJ and the FTC are probing — much as I have been predicting — or was it causing? 😉— for months now.
We need to make right the theft of a generation’s childhood through Instagram and Facebook. Part of the reason Tina feels a need to make an account of her youth is because so much of it was so documented online. I strongly suspect the reason so many young people are so frightened with the world is because the panopticon was used against them rather to protect them.
Now I have never been terribly tribal — I would not join a club or a secret society which would have me as a member — but I am obsessed with getting things right. David Frum would prefer tribal loyalty to accuracy or integrity.
In a way, he was the perfect mentor to Tina. Or should I say handler? She dutifully credits and thanks him in her book. In any event I haven’t decided if I shall attend Frum’s interview of Tina Nguyen at Politics and Prose this Saturday.
To be honest such things seem both behind and beneath me.
Still, the spirit is willing. Who knows maybe I can still talk truth to power.
But is David Frum even powerful these days?
For all their talk about preserving democracy it was yours truly who was working with the FBI and the U.S. intelligence services to see that those who participated in January 6th were identified and brought to justice.
Happy to have done my duty for my country. No need to thank me. The right people know.