We’re almost done with this week. And boy, the Mean Machine, or the Green Regime, or Team Epstein, or the Preen Hareem, or whatever moniker you want to lay on our pathetic and worthless ruling class, has not had it good over the last few days.
Wow.
We could show you more videos of Joe Biden proving he’s not even of slightly below average mental acuity, but you’ve likely already seen them. We could show you economic numbers and poll numbers galore. You already know what’s going on.
But instead we’ll go a little bit off the beaten track to show you how somehow maybe the fever of corruption and tyranny that has seized us for most of the past 15 years or so is beginning to break.
And it might be that this week was when things turned.
Or maybe not. Generally speaking, any pronouncements about history made in the moment usually turn out to sound stupid. There are always dead-cat bounces, and that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train as often as not.
But…
1. Fried, Not Freed
This week, the FTX crypto grifter par excellence Sam Bankman-Fried was denied bail by the federal 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals:
A U.S. appeals court on Thursday upheld a judge’s decision to jail former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried ahead of his Oct. 3 trial on fraud charges stemming from the November 2022 collapse of his now-bankrupt FTX exchange.
In a written decision, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said it agreed with U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s finding that Bankman-Fried had likely attempted to tamper with two witnesses.
This included his sharing the personal writings of Caroline Ellison, the former chief executive of his Alameda Research hedge fund, with a New York Times reporter.
Ellison has pleaded guilty to fraud and is expected to testify against Bankman-Fried, a former romantic partner. In her writings, she described feeling “unhappy and overwhelmed” with her job and “hurt/rejected” from a breakup with Bankman-Fried.
Kaplan had revoked Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bail on Aug. 11.
The three judges on Thursday said they were unpersuaded by Bankman-Fried’s argument that Kaplan failed to credit the defendant for exercising his First Amendment constitutional right to speak with the press and try to restore his reputation.
They wrote that Kaplan “correctly determined that when a person engages in speech to commit a criminal offense such as witness tampering, that speech falls outside the zone of constitutional protection.”
That was certainly bad news for America’s not-quite-First Family of elite crooks (that designation clearly belongs to the Bidens), but it wasn’t the only setback they were hit with:
The father of disgraced cryptocurrency kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried sat on the advisory board of the liberal dark money behemoth Arabella Advisors and likely had access to the group’s funds, a federal lawsuit filed against Bankman-Fried’s parents on Tuesday charged.
The lawsuit, filed by Bankman-Fried’s defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, cites communications from the elder Bankman in which he discussed having access to Arabella funds. The suit also reveals that FTX had a special arrangement with the largest Arabella affiliate, the New Venture Fund, through which the crypto trading firm and its donors could contribute to “select charitable causes.” Sam Bankman-Fried is accused of stealing billions of dollars from FTX customer funds to keep his hedge fund afloat and to donate to political causes.
Though the extent of Allan Joseph Bankman’s involvement in the Arabella advisory board or the level of control he had over the consultancy is unclear, the lawsuit shows the elder Bankman discussing Arabella and its corresponding non-profit, New Venture Fund, as vehicles to move money around and obscure its origin.
Arabella’s network of five nonprofit funds, which do not have to disclose their donors, have spent billions of dollars operating a vast array of left-wing advocacy groups that present themselves to the public as grassroots initiatives.
Arabella spokesman Steve Sampson told the Washington Free Beacon that Bankman “has never had any role at Arabella Advisors.”
But the lawsuit cites communications from the elder Bankman in which he discussed routing Arabella funds through his son.
“We considered having funds made available by Sam through Arabella, through our own 501(c)(3), through a foreign entity with a 501(c)(3)-like charter, and through Alameda as a public benefit corporation,” Bankman allegedly said in connection with a discussion surrounding gift taxes.
The FTX lawsuit alleges that Allan Joseph Bankman and his wife, Barbara Fried–both Stanford Law professors and major Democratic donors–played a direct role in FTX’s downfall through breaches of fiduciary duties, fraudulent transfers, and unjust enrichment. The lawsuit cited Bankman’s discussions of his son’s partnership with Arabella as proof he had “unfettered access” to FTX’s finances.
Not enough people understand what Arabella Advisors actually does or what a massive role they play in the fact that the Left has oodles and scads of ready money available to fund the most noxious, horrific, civilization-killing bad ideas imaginable, most of which are soon embraced by the idiots in the ruling class as the Next Big Thing.
But maybe now some will understand just how mobbed up this cabal is. The idea that Bankman-Fried and his slimeball grifter parents were stealing money from FTX investors to play lefty politics and used Arabella as a conduit for at least some of it is something that could, if it could be proven, change things.
And if that house of cards were to come down, well … I’m sorry you’re sorry.
2. We Know a Little More About Jan. 6 Now, Don’t We?
This isn’t about Ray Epps and the shiatzu greasedown he got from the Justice Department. No, it’s about the untold number of G-men taking part in the Fedsurrection that day. The New York Post’s Miranda Devine reported this on Tuesday:
The FBI had so many paid informants at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that it lost track of the number and had to perform a later audit to determine exactly how many “Confidential Human Sources” run by different FBI field offices were present that day, a former assistant director of the bureau has told lawmakers.
At least one informant was communicating with his FBI handler as he entered the Capitol, according to Steven D’Antuono, formerly in charge of the bureau’s Washington field office.
D’Antuono has testified behind closed doors to the House Judiciary Committee that his office was aware before the riot that some of their informants would attend a “Stop the Steal” rally thrown by former President Donald Trump, but he only learned after the fact that informants run by other field offices also were present, along with others who had participated of their own accord.
The Washington field office had to ask FBI headquarters “to do a poll or put out something to people saying w[ere] any CHSs involved,” he said, so they could get a handle on the scale of the FBI’s spying operations at the Capitol that day.
“We started getting responses back” from FBI headquarters, added D’Antuono, which helped identify which field offices had planted confidential informants in the crowd.
…
In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) described D’Antuono’s testimony as “extremely concerning.”
It suggests that “the FBI cannot adequately track the activities and operations of its informants, and that it lost control of its CHSs present at the Capitol on January 6,” he wrote.
“These revelations reinforce existing concerns, identified by Special Counsel [John] Durham, about the FBI’s use of, and payment to, CHSs who have fabricated evidence and misrepresented information.
“The Justice Department Inspector General also identified critical problems in the FBI’s CHS program,” Jordan added, “including the FBI’s failure to fully vet CHSs and the FBI’s willingness to ignore red flags that would call into question an informant’s reliability.”
This is why the Right is going to need to calibrate its responses to the various political aggressions inflicted by the ruling elite rather carefully. I said in this week’s Spectacle podcast episode that look, you think about these things and you say, “We need to think like Democrats here,” but the problem is that the Democrats are already thinking like Democrats. So when you decide you’re going to run a mostly peaceful protest at the Capitol, knowing that riots the previous summer had a chilling effect on your own politicians, you’d better be ready to expect something just like what happened on Jan. 6.
Which was that the Mean Machine saw it coming, salted the crowd with agents provocateur, created horrifying optics, and then played up the carnival as a means to defame an entire political movement as Nazis, Kluckers, and terrorists.
Resist we much, in the famous words of Al Sharpton. But the methods need to be more foolproof because we know that the regime isn’t bound by the recognizable rules.
But those details are for another day. Because we also have…
3. Rupert Murdoch Is Leaving, and Nobody Really Cares
The effective end of Fox News, as I’ve written, came when Tucker Carlson was fired. Carlson’s Twitter podcast show draws far more eyes than anything Fox puts out, and its current lineup of hosts is mostly irrelevant when compared to the panoply of independent commentators and pundits on the right, from Carlson and Glenn Beck to Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens and on down the list.
Cable news is dying. CNN is dead and cold, despite attempts by Discovery to revive it (it’s clear that firing the Jeff Zuckers and Don Lemons of the world didn’t fix anything). And Fox, under the recent management of Murdoch, has been bleeding profusely for a while.
Everybody knows Fox News is controlled opposition. It’s not that Laura Ingraham or Sean Hannity or Jesse Watters or Greg Gutfeld are establishment shills, but Carlson’s firing made it obvious that there’s a box you’re going to live in if you want to host a show on that channel.
And the public has moved on from that box.
So now Murdoch is turning the reins over to his son Lachlan, who the other corporate media critters are saying is to Rupert’s right. That would make him different from most of the other Murdoch kids who are essentially limousine liberals.
But it doesn’t much matter who the captain of that Titanic is. The iceberg has already ripped through the hull and the water is rushing in. Cable news — cable television, for that matter — is on its way to the bottom. If Fox manages to maintain its identity as a conservative outlet as the whole industry craters, that’s nice. But we’re moving on because independent media is the next thing.
4. Biden Admin Failapalooza
How about a grab bag of just how much #FAIL Team Biden could pile up in a short period of time?
Well, there was Merrick Garland appearing before the House this week. The five minutes he spent getting torn to shreds by Rep. Mike Johnson were a pretty good avatar for how that went:
And there was Joe Biden trying to ingratiate himself with the United Auto Workers, who have gone on strike — mostly because of what Joe Biden is doing to the auto industry — and that didn’t go so well:
Karine Jean-Pierre says Biden, who calls himself the "most pro-union president in history," has no plans to visit striking auto workers — nor send administration officials pic.twitter.com/w4l8Xmw9lp
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 21, 2023
Then there’s this:
Senator John Fetterman delivers a powerful message in support of the United Auto Workers.
Truly inspirational!
“My message to the, the CEOs, CEOs is, you know, it's $74 million, you know, collectively earning that, you know, how many yachts can they need, you know, to, to… pic.twitter.com/FwlPdWB39o
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 19, 2023
The strike is likely to expand, and right now it looks like it’s going to be one of the most significant labor disputes of the century — and it comes as the writers and actors are on strike against the film industry. This is all of a sudden the labor apocalypse, something nobody really saw coming.
Wonder who else might go on strike soon.
Maybe AOC, who isn’t used to being treated like this:
Do they learn anything? Surely you jest:
BREAKING — The Biden administration has appointed James Clapper, John Brennan, and Paul Kolbe, former intelligence officials, to a DHS "Homeland Intelligence Experts Group" handling national security issues.
These individuals signed the fraudulent October 2020 letter deceptively… pic.twitter.com/6qv5ybw4fR
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) September 19, 2023
BREAKING: Third IRS official says Biden Justice Department blocked Weiss from charging Hunter https://t.co/8danxDIVcR
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) September 21, 2023
We could go on, but I need to save something for next week. Meanwhile…
5. Ummm, Well…
The next time you hear about the need for a pay increase for teachers, remember this:
If this was your kid, WWYD?
pic.twitter.com/KS49sG08XE— AlphaFo???? (@Alphafox78) September 20, 2023
Some surely aren’t making enough money.
This one? Probably not so much.
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