I had antagonized about the wisdom of writing on this topic but a friend reached out to me and said that our role is to prevent the dangers for others. “Be who you needed when you were younger,” she says. Quite right so this one is for me, but it’s also for us — the prodigies who were recruited.
The latest National Conservatism conference took place in Orlando. Of course it did. By way of full disclosure I had tried to attend the latest National Conservatism conference in 2019 but was rebuffed without explanation — a somewhat surprising turn of events for someone who used to attend quite a number of right wing events. I suppose the jig is up. They know what I am and I know what they are.
No matter! The show was back on in 2021 — I didn’t attend but watched some of the speeches virtually (as we seem to do everything these days) — and a motley crew of Conservatism Inc. befell Orlando.
Most gave the sort of humdrum speech, with the notable exception of Peter Thiel, whom the Israelis running National Conservatism are cultivating to replace Sheldon Adelson as their prime benefactor.
We will turn later to Thiel’s rather wild speech before the National Conservatism audience but before we do let’s consider for a moment how Conservatism Inc. has dispensed with all pretense and just gone full mob. This turn seems to coincide with the decline in the GOP from a suburban party to a working class party.
For those paying attention this turn seemed inevitable. After all, Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson, two of Trump’s biggest donors, had long running ties to both China and to organized crime, so much so that writer Ron Unz suggested that China pull those Macao casino permits so as to calm things down. That they didn’t is the sort of dragon that didn’t roar story we ought to have made a bigger about at the time.
Still CPAC is going to be in Budapest this coming spring (weird!) and there are a number of organizations springing up in the Sunshine State, especially around Orlando. Sunlight isn’t always the best disinfectant and Florida remains a sunny place for shady people who don’t like to pay their taxes or their dues.
Orlando is a make-believe place where adults love to dress up and parade around a child’s domain. The Mouse’s House. It’s also where the mob runs rampant and where everyone is from some place else, usually up to no good. To get sense of the cultural milieu I recommend the absolutely heartbreaking 2017 film about Orlando called The Florida Project starring Willem Dafoe.
Yes, Orlando’s not a real place — there are no Great Men from Orlando — so it’s a fitting place for the National Conservatism conference, where once again grown men dress up and pretend to be things that they are not, like actual conservatives who care about the nation state or the historic American people.
I am referring to Yoram Hazony’s latest influence operation — “National Conservatism,” which is, of course, backed by Chinese organized crime by way of the late Sheldon Adelson, who has backed Hazony’s efforts to the hilt.
In this development Hazony is not alone. We’ve already explored Ben Shapiro’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party through the Wilks Brothers, the Texas billionaire frackers. Indeed, it’s my contention that Hazony’s whole anti-imperialism shtick is in fact warmed over Maoism. And to that end: Hazony has called for American withdrawal from the United Nations and NATO. You might ask: Will an America withdrawing from those institutions be good for America or will it empower other nations?
That Hazony is backed by Chinese cash is a big claim and we will get into that in a moment but it looks like Connie Bruck has the definitive piece in the New Yorker in 2008, entitled “The Brass Ring” detailing the decades long relationship between Sheldon Adelson and the Chinese Communist Party. I highly recommend it.
Far from what Hazony argues — that it’s nationalism vs. imperialism — it’s in fact a war of empires. To beat the Chinese we will have to dust off the British imperial playbook. We, the English-speaking peoples of the world, have to respond to the rising Chinese threat. That’s what AUKUS is about. That’s what the Quad is about. The arsenal of democracy is on the move once more.
We’ve hitherto talked about intellectual cul de sacs in the context of Israeli agent of influence Eric Weinstein and we’ve also discussed the secret history of Facebook and its ties to Israeli and Russian intelligence through Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg. That’s been a good start but it's not sufficient is it?
We haven’t really examined the degree to which a lot of activities are backed by organized crime, particularly of a foreign bent.
Now organized crime has its longstanding relationship with the intelligence services — see Jeffrey Epstein, The National Enquirer, or even CIA chief of counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton, whose death was mourned in Israel — and the Mob isn’t always a monolith. It, too, has its factions. Sometimes you want to stoke a mob war to take them both out. [Edited details of James Jesus Angleton’s death!]
I recall this great scene from The Good Shepherd, a 2006 film, which sums up the mafia-intelligence relationship nicely and brutally enough.
One more interesting thing I’ve noticed in recent years is how the intelligence services recruit the sons and daughters of known mobsters so that when the father dies, the son or daughter can be made good. There are patriots among even among the most hardened of criminals. Each of us has a choice to make. Each of us can choose the right thing. The sins of the father may affect the son but the father is guilty only of his own. This is the Western way. We don’t jail whole families as they do in North Korea because of their bad seed. Conversions can be compelled by the State and there’s no conversion it loves so much as that of the mobster’s son at the death bed of the mobster.
In any event, the Mob loves to traffic in human beings because they love slaves. Slaves continue to produce for you. You can skim just enough off of their labor for forever. The canniest of intelligence services, namely the Russian and Chinese, aligned with their domestic mobs, use their people as a sort of weapon against the other powers and then take their vig. These leaders rule as feudal lords. They send their most capable people into the West and then steal the money through remittances. Hey, it beats working on fixing the real problems in the ossified, oligarchic societies. Yes, oftentimes foreign powers use our country as a dumping ground.
As we’ve already discussed another way of looking at the collapse of the Soviet Union is as a dodge for the Russians to shed themselves of the refusenik Jews who were then sent to America and Israel.
That so much of the discussion around modern politics seems to be from the children or grandchildren of these refuseniks is telling enough. And sure enough, Hazony is a descendant of Ukrainian Jews. Hazony’s parents came from Kiev and moved to Palestine in 1924, making him an easy candidate and recruit for Likudnite support.
This is chutzpah to lecture others about nationalism when you have no nation is extreme. Their ancestors having fled their homeland for other nations they insist upon lecturing us on what it means to be American.
Indeed the emerging geopolitical reality of the moment we find ourselves in was missing altogether from the National Conservatism Conference.
There are but three real countries — China, Russia, and AUKUS — and everyone else crews up accordingly. Some countries and entities — the crime syndicate known as the UAE, the criminal team surrounding Netanyahu, and the savages currently running Saudi Arabia — elect to middle man between these countries. We are returning “back to blood.”
There will be correspondingly less middle manning between the countries.
Alas just as the intelligence services are recruiting the sons and daughters of the mob so too are foreign intelligence officers trying to recruit ambitious young Americans. Every serious nation tries to turn the children of its enemies against their parents and America is a big fat target.
If you are a strange person who nevertheless pays attention one of the things you learn is that there are ops running to recruit the youths. Every state is successful only to the extent that it replicates itself and if it replicates itself by using the enemy’s children? Well so much the better. This is nature’s brood parasite strategy — getting the other bird to raise your young — as applied to national affairs.
Naturally there is a predatory aspect to some of this recruiting behavior which you can see with Jeffrey Epstein grooming young women to build blackmail files for his intelligence needs. Or you can see Mao Zedong allegedly going full pedophile (allegedly) and bedding whatever young girls he could get. Or with John Weaver, the Huntsman campaign manager turned Russian lobbyist, grooming young men. (Weaver was McCain’s consigliere for twelve years and the back and forth kompromat they engaged in helped them both and is far more insidious.)
If politics is show business for ugly people there’s still a casting couch. Just ask Kamala Harris, who worked her way from obscurity to the Vice Presidency by, among other things, sleeping with power broker Willie Brown. She was 29 and he was 60.
Indeed I take this process rather personally, having been a targeted recruit myself. You’ll find that if you are strange or gifted you’ll be a particularly valuable recruit and I was no exception. As this Substack gains readers I’ll discuss more how I fell in with a rival nation’s intelligence services but we aren’t there yet. Soon.
In my case the foreign agent found something I wrote on my college blog and then offered me an absurdly well paying job fresh out of college. This spy re-introduced me to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell — I had already met them working for Alan Dershowitz — and NXIVM cult. I saw the way he raised money from the foreign connected billionaires and lived well beyond his station. When I protested how he was treating me and encouraging me to commit crimes he quickly recruited my friend and fired me. Alas he was not the last foreign agent I met who tried to get me.
Sometimes vanity will work for the young person and they need not offer much money at all. Steve Bannon has become a sort of master groomer taking young and ambitious young patriots and then leading them down into dark paths before discarding them altogether. I’ve watched the process unfold time and again as I get older. Politics people are bad people and oftentimes it’s too hard to tell until it is too late.
These networks require funding to pay for them and that’s where American billionaires come in.
How these influence operations are financed is through American billionaires who are oftentimes constructs of those foreign powers. As I have often stated we are in the construct wars so it helps to know the players.
The greatest construct of the 20th and early 21st century is the late casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. His power extended across the planet.
The SoftBank deal merely made formal what had already been happening since 1985 when Adelson first started running his conventions in Asia.
Having secured funding from Japan’s Masa Son Adelson wasted no time in expanding globally, especially in Israel. He even tried unsuccessfully to legalize casino gambling in Israel where it remains illegal to this day.
It seems rather clear that Adelson’s money came from organized crime. Born in Boston — the purported son of a cabdriver — and incorporated in Tampa before expanding to Las Vegas and Macao, Adelson had a very close relationship, multi-decades-long with Newt Gingrich and the SEC and FBI were investigating Adelson’s criminal ties to the Chinese Triads before his death earlier this year. ("Bribes, Chinese Mob Ties Alleged at Casino of Gingrich Money Man," 2012.)
A FRONTLINE Investigation made it clear as far back as 2012. Sheldon Adelson was bringing Chinese cash into the American political system.
At least one prominent Republican has expressed concern about the source of Adelson’s campaign contributions. “Much of Mr. Adelson’s casino profits that go to him come from his casino in Macau,” Sen. John McCain noted in an interview with the PBS NewsHour.
“Maybe in a roundabout way, foreign money is coming into an American political campaign,” said McCain, an Arizona Republican.
Though he had initially declined to support Trump (at least officially) Adelson really outdid himself in 2016 and took advantage of his own relationship with the real president — Jared Kushner — and Netanyahu.
“I would put Adelson at the very top of the list of both access and influence in the Trump administration,” said Craig Holman of the watchdog group Public Citizen. “I’ve never seen anything like it before, and I’ve been studying money in politics for 40 years.”
Adelson’s relationships may even extend into the CIA’s spying on Julian Assange — if Russophile Max Blumenthal is to be believed.
Given Adelson’s closeness with MBS, MBZ, and Netanyahu to say nothing of President Xi Jinping we might wonder: Was he two timing the CIA? Well, you can’t get his FBI file nearly a year after his death.
When naming a front group it helps to use the language of the target. The more you make your front group sound innocuous, even desirable, you can quickly take over the target’s mind. In espionage, as in politics, you should think that everything is its opposite until proven otherwise.
Obama’s “Hope & Change” delivered more of the same. Clinton was building a bridge to the 21st century but some very unsavory people from the 20th century came with him. Trump’s Make America Great Again sure seemed to focus a lot on the Middle East, didn’t it?
A lot of front groups tend to use the language of the target. This has a double effect and goes back along time. The FBI had so thoroughly penetrated the American Communist Party that the Russians, for their part, infiltrated the anti-Communist John Birch Society.
The National Conservatism conference should be seen in this context. It’s Israeli Hasbara — or information warfare as explanation.
Enter Yoram Hazony. Hazony has played a clever game by naming his latest incarnation the Burke Foundation. But his Burke is a selective telling. You can search in vain, though, for any discussion around Burke’s anti-Semitism.
Burke did not want to turn his beloved Englishmen into Jews whereas Hazony wants to turn everyone into Jews. Get Burke to argue the opposite.
The New Republic knows the score about Hazony.
Media coverage of Hazony in the United States has tended to refer to him simply as an “Israeli political philosopher,” but the label doesn’t really do justice to his interesting and highly illustrative career. Born in Israel in 1964, but raised and educated in the United States, he described being “mesmerized” by an encounter as a Princeton undergraduate with the ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane, a few years before Kahane’s party was banned in Israel for anti-Arab racism. Going on to earn a doctorate in political theory, Hazony chose not to pursue an academic career, instead moving to Israel with Princeton friends to found the Shalem Center, an American-style think tank based in Jerusalem. Hazony was an early member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle, and Shalem would remain closely aligned with the Likud Party. It would also serve as a nexus for the Israeli and American right; funding came from American billionaires like Ronald Lauder and Sheldon Adelson, while the roster of fellows tended to feature Israeli political figures who played well inside the Beltway. Hazony and others in the Shalem leadership spent the 1990s living in Eli, an Israeli settlement deep in the West Bank, until security concerns following the Second Intifada convinced them to relocate to East Jerusalem.
Yoram Hazony is a strange sort of man. So, too, is his brother David who rather humorously got into a tiff with Scott Adams once Adams merely retweeted the truth about Ghislaine Maxwell’s father’s ties to the Mossad. I think you doth protest too much, David.
Hazony has spoken on the “crisis in Israel” after he founded the Shalem Center with money from Ronald Lauder and Sheldon Adelson, who provided Hazony with over $4.5 million.
Haaretz’s Na'ama Lanski and Daphna Berman examined how a lot of that money has been been blown.
The subhead says it all: “Huge donations allow management to enjoy luxury villas and big salaries, the academic director has 'peculiar habits,' personnel turnover is rapid - and the CFO was convicted of embezzlement.”
What a CFO convicted of embezzlement?!?
Not bad work if you can get it.
We’ve hitherto explained the role that Israel has played in the constructing of Peter Thiel.
We didn’t mention but Peter is an investor alongside the late Jeffrey Epstein in Carbyne. Also invested is Ehud Barak, the former spymaster turned prime minister.
Trae Stephens, also of Thiel-backed Founders Fund, is on the advisory board. “It is critically important that we fix our dilapidated emergency response systems around the world,” said Stephens in 2018. Left unanswered by Trae is whether or not the Israeli-firm was spying on its customers in those very 911 emergency situations in much the same way that AnyVision, NSO Group, and a host of other Israeli firms are credibly accused.
Given these Israeli ties, it wasn’t altogether surprising that we might find him giving a key note address.
What was surprising was to hear Thiel’s full throated defense of bitcoin — only months after wondering whether or not it was an attack on the dollar by the Chinese. Why the sudden shift? Peter doesn’t say. This is odd.
Instead, Peter focuses on three failures of our time — covid, Afghanistan, and the Fed.
I don’t necessarily disagree with Peter’s criticisms of the schizophrenic nature of our health policies. I was actually one of the first people to raise these issues with Fauci and masks generally under my pseudonym.
I also was pretty early on the lab leak. I don’t think, for example, that it’s a coincidence that Nicholas Wade, former science columnist for the New York Times, discusses the lab leak hypothesis right around the same time as Mi6 made that exact assessment. (Wade’s father worked for Mi5.) For what it’s worth, the evidence seems to point to covid being a bioweapon targeting the Indians.
But I have to ask: Is Peter funding any research on coronavirus? Why not? Has he examined the role that genetics plays in covid? There’s a lot of research there.
Afghanistan can’t really be understood without discussing the role of Dubai, the money laundering capital, where all the Afghanistan money went.
And yet Palantir, on whose board Peter sits, is doing deals with UAE at precisely the time that the intelligence community is concerned about UAE’s growing relationship with China. I mean they were even trying to build a secret port together.
Peter is also on the board of Stripe and Stripe, too, is doing deals with UAE.
Let’s turn now to the Fed. What’s really going on with inflation?
While it’s true that we should never really believe our central banks it’s hard to know what to think here. Inflation may become a persistent, permanent feature of our society. Good.
It helps decrease the costs for debtors and the youths in our country are heavily indebted.
The question is always about what replaces dollarization. Could it be the alliance between Russia-China against SWIFT? Seems unlikely. The Euro? Hard to see how that happens.
Peter once recommended a book to me called Princes of the Yen. I highly recommend watching the movie.
Essentially the argument is that central banks are used to fundamentally transform an economy.
The Fed is clearly engaged in ending a lot of the mobbed up industries which rely on underpaid labor. Some of that labor is immigrant, some of it young people, all of it bad. Indeed we should want these shitty jobs to go away. We should push for policies that automate those jobs away.
We will reestablish our supply chains — probably with Turkey where it’s gotten way cheaper thanks to devaluing the lira.
In the end China is the reason for the high inflation. China lurks behind all of it. They are gauging us — from the university to the grocery store.
We see Professor Charles Lieber of Harvard selling out America to the Chinese. Harvard hates America, indeed.
We see Chinese inflating our real estate market while captured city councils bar new housing.
“The big picture is we have an affordability crisis for housing in the cities where the jobs are,” [Professor Benjamin] Keys [of Wharton] said. “One of the real tensions in the U.S. housing market is that the places that are seeing sharp job growth are not creating new housing quickly enough to accommodate that job growth.”
….
Chinese buyers have led foreign investments in U.S. homes for the past seven years. In 2019-2020, they bought U.S. home properties worth $11.5 billion, or little more than a sixth of the total, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors.
And we see Chinese control over life saving drugs while they pump us full of killer pain killers.
All of this raises a question for our rich.
Where were you, Peter? When your people needed you… Who even are your people?
I promise if you help solve these issues we’ll throw you a ticker tape parade.
The link you provided about James Jesus Angleton says he is buried in Boise, Idaho, not Israel. https://spartacus-educational.com/SSangleton.htm