One of the things Elon Musk bought for $44 billion was proprietary rights to Twitter’s internal communications and — whoo, doggies! — what a treasure trove it proves to be:
Elon Musk’s Twitter released internal discussions about censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story Friday night via journalist Matt Taibbi.
The documents reveal widespread internal and external concern at the suppression of the story, a decision made without CEO Jack Dorsey’s knowledge and spearheaded by Vijaya Gadde, then the head of Trust & Safety — Twitter’s top censor. . . .
The documents, mostly internal communications from Twitter and emails with external parties, showed widespread unease with the decision and concerns about how it could be explained to lawmakers and the public. . . .
• Trust & Safety chief Vijaya Gadde, long believed to be the driving force of censorship at the company, spearheaded the decision.
• Numerous top Twitter employees, especially from the communications and policy teams — whose job is to maintain relations with lawmakers and the press — expressed concern at the decision.
• Immediate warnings from Twitter’s Washington D.C. contacts followed, including an email from Democrat representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) who warned the decision had generated “huge backlash” on capitol hill, and expressed concerns about Twitter undermining the freedom to publish.
Aside from Rep. Khanna’s communications, which imagined a future in which newspapers would be unable to publish hacked evidence of war crimes, other Democrats reportedly complained that Twitter had not gone far enough in its censorship of the press.
Ace of Spades was critical of the narrative about what is being call Twittergate, and I’ll get to his criticism momentarily, but first I want to make a couple of points of my own. In the long Twitter thread where Matt Taibbi told this story, two messages struck me as “smoking guns”:
https://t.co/j4EeXEAw6F can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”: pic.twitter.com/w1wBMlG33U
The problem with the “hacked materials” ruling, several sources said, was that this normally required an official/law enforcement finding of a hack. But such a finding never appears throughout what one executive describes as a “whirlwind” 24-hour, company-wide mess. pic.twitter.com/aONKCROEOd
On the first point, you see the “PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL” message that “our teams continue to investigate the origins of the materials included in the reporting” — raising the question: “Why?”
The article by the New York Post — the one that Twitter was suppressing — explained exactly how they had obtained the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which had been abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. This clearly was not “hacking,” so why the need to “investigate”? What would have led anyone at Twitter to suspect hacking at all? It’s a nonsensical excuse, but is partially explained by the second point: The casual mention that The “existing policy framework” (i.e., the Hacked Materials Policy) originated as a response to “the 2016 election” (i.e., Team Hillary whining that they were victims of “Russian collusion” hackers). So you see that the claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was the result of “hacking” was directly connected to Hillary Clinton’s claims about her emails being “hacked” in 2016. And, of course, you had Deep State “sources” telling the media that Hunter Biden’s laptop was part of a “Russian disinformation” operation. So this paranoid conspiracy theory — “Russia! Russia! Russia!” — became the basis of censorship.
Which brings us to Point Three:
28. To which former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker again seems to advise staying the non-course, because “caution is warranted”: pic.twitter.com/tg4D0gLWI6
OH EM EFFING GEE! James Baker, an ex-FBI lawyer who was disgraced for his role in the “Russian collusion” hoax, was directly involved in the decision to censor the New York Post story! And notice, also, that Baker seems to be the guy whose messages routinely contain the “PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL” header, indicating that he was also the source of the message about “our team” investigating the Hunter Biden laptop story under the Hacked Materials Policy.
“Mistakes were made.” “Protocols let us down.”
The FBI, which already had the laptop and knew it was real and likely to leak, already told Twitter to expect Russian hack and “dumps,” to prepare them to take just this action. They didn’t have to specifically tell them to suppress the laptop — they’d already prepared the battlespace.
This is bullshit. I’m disgusted and done.
>>>Ace: your take is the blame is being placed on Twitter and not the police state apparatus?
Yes, the FBI is being excused, and it’s being claimed that there was just a breakdown at Twitter, rather than deliberate suppression.
James Baker, General Counsel at twitter, is a former FBI lawyer who himself was disgraced for his role in Russiagate!
He lied about the FISA warrant and helped cover up the fraud perpetrated on the court.
And here he is at Twitter advising them to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story!
Nothing to see here, folks!
Yes, this is what’s revealed, but how is “the FBI being excused” by this revelation? I think Matt Taibbi (and Elon Musk) trust readers to add 2+2 and arrive at the sum of four, which is in fact what both Ace and I have done with these messages. What Musk wanted to show — the purpose of this historic act of transparency — was the inner workings of the decision-making process at Twitter in 2020, and the role of James Baker is very telling. But the fact that Taibbi didn’t editorialize about this aspect of the story in his Twitter thread does not mean that Taibbi (and Musk) are engaged in a “mistakes were made” whitewash. There will be a lot of follow-up and fallout from #Twittergate, I’m sure, and eventually the new GOP House majority will have committee hearings on this sordid mess.
Being a native of Atlanta, I can only shake my head in sorrow at what’s happened to that once-great city. Basically the entire city and most of the suburbs have become a shooting range in recent years. Perhaps Atlanta is not yet as bad as Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis or some of our nation’s other notorious murder zones, but it’s still plenty bad, and for the same reason that so many other cities have spiraled out of control.
To put it as politely as possible, the word is demographics.
A 12-year-old was killed and five teenagers were injured in a shooting Saturday night after gunfire erupted near Atlanta’s Atlantic Station retail district following a dispute involving juveniles, according to city officials.
Of those who were injured, one teenager sustained critical injuries while four others were “shot or injured in some way,” Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said in a news conference Sunday. Three guns were recovered from the scene.
Atlanta police previously said the shooting took place after a “dispute occurred that escalated to gunfire.” Around 8 p.m., a “group of juveniles” were escorted off Atlantic Station property by off-duty Atlanta police officers and Atlantic Station personnel, Atlanta Police Homicide Commander Lt. Germain Dearlove said in an earlier news conference.
“They were removed for unruly behavior and also curfew violations for Atlantic Station,” Dearlove told reporters. The group moved to 17th Street where the dispute occurred and gunfire erupted, Dearlove said.
On Sunday, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said the altercation occurred between individuals who knew each other and who had a conflict together earlier this month. Some of the individuals involved are known to police, he said, and warrants will likely be issued soon.
Atlantic Station is a massive 138-acre commercial development with shopping, dining and recreation, located on the site of a former steel mill. Located near the Georgia Tech campus and the upscale Midtown neighborhood, Atlantic Station was intended as an all-inclusive destination, the kind of place where you could spend an entire day, see a movie, eat a meal, go shopping, etc. But it has now become a magnet for teenage criminals, and scarcely a week goes by that there isn’t some story about violent mayhem perpetrated by these feral youth.
Notice that the news story about Saturday’s shooting doesn’t say anything about this “group of juveniles” in terms of demographics, but do you really need me to spell it out for you? I don’t think so.
Police now believe four people were involved in a shooting in east Atlanta’s Gresham Park neighborhood and that it started as an attempted home invasion. One person has since died in connection to the shooting, according to police.
DeKalb County police said officers responded around 5 p.m. Thursday evening — Thanksgiving day — to the 2700 block of Gresham Road after getting reports of a person shot.
When officers got there, police found three people ages 23, 18 and 15 with apparent gunshot wounds. All three were taken to a hospital in serious to critical condition, but the 18-year-old died from his injuries.
A fourth person, a 30-year-old man, later showed up at the hospital with a gunshot would. He was also linked to the incident, police said.
“Several other parties” who were also allegedly involved were detained at the scene with the help of SWAT officers, who police said were already in the area.
Detectives at the scene and hospital began questioning those involved, which authorities said revealed that the four men were were attempting to break into a home. While they were trying to get inside, police said that the group exchanged shots with someone who lived there.
At this time, police said the shooting “appears justified” and no charges are expected to be filed against the the person who fired the shot.
The three surviving subjects are expected to be charged with felony murder because of the death of their alleged accomplice. The two adults will also be charged with home invasion.
The would-be home invaders got shot by the homeowner, and because one of the perps died, his surviving accomplices will be charged with felony murder, a concept that Eugene Volokh helpfully explains. And that story is directly connected to . . .
DeKalb police said a 17-year-old was killed and two other people were also shot while attending a candlelight vigil for a recent homicide victim.
Police told Channel 2 Action News the suspect walked up to the victim and shot the 17-year-old during a candlelight vigil for Taneaious McCune, who was shot and killed during a Friday home invasion attempt on Gresham Road.
olice identified the victim Monday as 17-year-old Ian Hagerty.
The address is listed as the Highlands at East Atlanta Apartments.
While investigating this scene, an 11-year-old boy arrived at the Walmart at 2427 Gresham Road with a gunshot wound to his finger. He told police he was at this location when the shooting began. The 11-year-old was taken to an area hospital.
The shooter ran away from the scene, according to police. Detectives are on the scene investigating the situation.
So while they were mourning the perp killed in the earlier home invasion, somebody decided to shoot the mourners during the candlelight vigil.
“Hey, my hoodlum son got shot to death while he was breaking into somebody’s house. Want to come to the candlelight vigil in his honor?”
No, thank you.
Remember when the whole country decided to riot because one black guy died in police custody in Minneapolis? Now you’ve got black kids getting shot to death routinely in Atlanta and nobody seems to care.
It’s almost as if their lives don’t matter, or something.
Sam Brinton is self-evidently crazy. He is daft, deranged, bonkers, berserk, a few fries short of a Happy Meal and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
Exactly why Joe Biden would appoint this lunatic to a job working with nuclear technology in the Department of Energy — well, Democrats do crazy things all the time, and appointing a “genderfluid” kook to be Deputy Assistant Secretary is probably about par for the course.
The incident allegedly occurred at Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport on September 16 when a woman arriving from New Orleans went to the baggage carousel only to find that her navy blue Vera Bradley roller bag was missing. . . .
Law enforcement at the Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport were alerted to a missing suitcase in the baggage claim area on Sept. 16. The adult female victim said she flew into MSP on a Delta flight from New Orleans and went to retrieve her checked bag at carousel seven.
Airport records confirmed the navy blue Vera Bradley roller bag arrived at 4:40 p.m. but was missing from the carousel. So law enforcement reviewed video surveillance footage from the baggage claim area and observed Brinton removing a navy blue roller bag from carousel seven, according to a criminal complaint.
The complaint says Brinton removed a luggage tag from the bag, placed it into a handbag he was carrying, and “then left the area at a quick pace.” Brinton arrived at MSP Airport around 4:27 p.m. on an American Airlines flight from Washington, D.C., but did not check a bag, meaning he had no reason to visit baggage claim, according to the complaint.
The female victim, who estimated the bag cost $2,325, confirmed to police that the navy blue bag that Brinton took in the surveillance footage indeed belonged to her. Brinton later took an Uber to the InterContinental St. Paul Riverfront hotel where he checked in with the blue bag, according to the criminal complaint. He later returned to the airport on September 18 with the same bag in hand when he departed for Washington, DC.
On October 9, police questioned Brinton about the bag and if he “took anything that did not belong” to him. Brinton reportedly responded, “Not that I know of.”
“If I had taken the wrong bag, I am happy to return it, but I don’t have any clothes for another individual. That was my clothes when I opened the bag,” he told the police.
Two hours after the interview, Brinton then allegedly called the investigating officer and admitted to not being “completely honest.” According to Brinton, he mistakenly took the navy blue bag due to him being tired from his trip and “got nervous” upon realizing that the bag belonged to someone else when arriving at his hotel room. Not knowing what to do, Brinton then allegedly told police that he left the woman’s clothes in the hotel room drawers and took the bag with him anyway in order to keep up appearances.
Brinton has allegedly not returned the bag to the female victim and police said no clothing was recovered from the hotel room. His first court hearing is scheduled for December 19 in Hennepin County.
Ace of Spades had fun with the shifting stories told by Brinton. I’m dubious of the claim that the stolen bag and its contents were worth more than $2,000, because you can get a Vera Bradley bag for about $500, and who puts $1,500 worth of stuff in their luggage? But the biggest question is why would Brinton steal somebody’s luggage? You’re a Deputy Assistant Secretary and you’re acting like some kind of petty thief?
It doesn’t make sense, but that’s just the way it is with lunatics — their behavior doesn’t make sense, like when 81 million people decided that Joe Biden should be President of the United States, a completely crazy choice that has had predictably crazy consequences.
Hopewell Chin’ono is an award-winning journalist who has relentlessly exposed the evils of the lawless and corrupt regime in Zimbabwe:
In 2020, Hopewell reported on alleged Covid-19 procurement fraud within the health ministry, which led to the arrest and sacking of Health Minister Obadiah Moyo. It was President Emmerson Mnangagwa who fired Obadiah in July for “inappropriate conduct” over the $60 million medicines supply scandal. On July 20, 2020, Hopewell was arrested and charged with inciting public violence. The US embassy called Hopewell’s arrest “deeply concerning”, while his lawyer called it “an abduction” and Amnesty accused Zimbabwean authorities of “misusing the criminal justice system to persecute journalists and activists”. He was freed in September on bail, then he was arrested again in November 2020 and was charged with obstructing justice and contempt of court for a tweet about the court outcome of a gold smuggling scandal.
Hopewell Chin’ono was released on bail on January 27, 2021 after spending three weeks in prison. Chin’ono expressed concern about the COVID-19 pandemic in the overcrowded Chikurubi Prison and accuses the government of harassment for arresting him three times in five months.
Given such credentials, Chin’ono must be taken seriously when he warns of the risks of a general “amnesty” for banned accounts on Twitter. And certainly we should hope that Elon Musk will have his staff exercise caution when it comes to such cases as these, where repressive regimes are using “ghost accounts” to harass their critics. But the problem in the United States is almost the diametrical opposite situation, i.e., critics of the regime have been banned, because Twitter staff were working with the Democratic Party to effectively prohibit dissent.
The New York Post, America’s oldest continuously published newspaper, had its Twitter account suspended at the behest of intelligence officials who falsely declared the Hunter Biden laptop story to be “Russian disinformation.” (For the record, I do not think the Biden family is less corrupt than the rulers of Zimbabwe.) Comparing the problems in America to the problems in Zimbabwe is apples and oranges, of course, but that’s the point: If we don’t want to descend into a Third World nightmare, the voices of opponents of the Democratic Party must be heard. Maybe you think Zimbabwe can’t happen here, but you’re wrong. I mean, look what Democrats have done to Chicago and Philadelphia . . .
My brother Kirby has been following the unsolved murder of the four university students in Idaho, and a few days ago, he said to me, “This is a maniac. This is one sick m****rf***er, somebody who’s obsessed with horror movies, like Friday the 13th.” Almost from the beginning, when this case first started making national headlines, Kirby has believed that this was not the perpetrator’s first murder.
Why should you pay attention to my brother’s hunches? Because he’s got an uncanny record of accuracy about such things. Do you remember the 2002 D.C. sniper case? Kirby solved that before the FBI did.
After it was made public that “profilers” believed the sniper was a white male, Kirby called me when I was working at The Washington Times to tell me the profilers were wrong: “Stacy, it’s got to be a black guy.” His explanation was that some of the shootings were in predominantly black neighborhoods. How could a white guy be going in and out of neighborhoods like that without attracting attention? I passed this idea along to my coworkers, who scoffed that “Stacy’s truck driver brother” knew more about the case than the geniuses at FBI headquarters, but of course, Kirby was right. So, yeah, pay attention.
Why is the FBI so interested in this case? Kirby points out that if, as some have suggested, the murderer was a disgruntled ex-boyfriend of one of the slain girls, such a merely local crime would not attract this much FBI involvement. What do we know about the killings? Six people were in the residence at the time of the murders, sometime after 3 a.m. on Nov. 13, and the four victims were on the second and third floors. Police say there was no sign of forced entry. So somebody managed to get into this house in the pre-dawn hours of a Sunday morning without waking anyone, stab four people to death and leave behind two others, apparently in the basement, who slept through the whole thing.
Nearly two weeks later, police still haven’t identified a suspect, so it seems that this knife-wielding killer must have been very careful in his plan to commit this crime and get away with it. This doesn’t seem to be some sudden act of impulsive rage, but rather an act that was methodically planned. And then we come back to Kirby’s belief that this quadruple homicide wasn’t the killer’s first crime:
The grieving mother of a 26-year-old man murdered in Oregon last year says she has been given “hope” that the case will finally be solved after police revealed they are exploring a potential link to the murders of four University of Idaho students in Moscow.
Myra Juetten told The Independent on Thursday that finding out who killed her son Travis Juetten in a brutal stabbing attack in his home in Silverton, Oregon – and also catching the killer of the slain students in Idaho – would be “the best Christmas present ever”.
“I want answers for all five of them,” she said of the victims.
“If law enforcement can work together and solve both cases that would be the best Christmas present ever.”
Back on 13 August 2021, Travis, 26, and his wife Jamilyn Juetten, 24, were woken at around 3am when a masked assailant broke into their home, entered their bedroom and stabbed them both multiple times with a knife.
Travis tried to fight off the attacker but was stabbed to death. Ms Juetten was stabbed 19 times but miraculously survived, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office said at the time.
Despite Travis’ family putting up a $50,000 reward for information leading to the killer, 15 months on, the case remains unsolved.
This week, similarities were drawn between the knife attack on the young couple and the 13 November stabbing murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, 400 miles away in Moscow.
Wait just a minute here — what day of the week was Aug. 13, 2021? It was a Friday. Just a coincidence, perhaps, but then you see that the Idaho victims were also killed on the 13th, and while it may be a bit of a stretch to connect these crimes, which happened 400 miles and 15 months apart, investigators don’t seem to have any other leads, so maybe this is more than a coincidence. Because one of the Oregon victims survived the attack, we know that the killer wore a mask, but they don’t say what kind of mask. Was it a hockey mask? Like Jason in Friday the 13th?
As investigators skipped Thanksgiving celebrations to continue their search for a suspect in the unsolved slaying of four University of Idaho students, a third unsolved stabbing in the Pacific Northwest has resurfaced with eerie similarities. . . .
[Thursday] morning, the Idaho Tribune reported that a third nearby attack shared similar characteristics. Sandra Ladd, 71, was found dead in her home in Washougal, Washington, on June 14, 2020, according to Oregon Crime Stoppers. Her death was ruled a homicide after the medical examiner found multiple stab wounds in her torso, Washougal police said at the time.
The two attacks [on Ladd and the Juettens] happened 14 months apart but within 70 miles of one another. The locations are roughly a five-hour drive west of Moscow, Idaho.
University of Idaho students Ethan Chapin, 20, Xana Kernodle, 20, Madison Mogen, 21, and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, were stabbed to death in their sleep on Nov. 13, 2022 between 3 and 4 a.m. in a rental house just off campus, according to police.
Like the attack on the Juettens, the incident happened between 3 and 4 a.m. on the 13th of the month.
Map showing location of three crimes.
Had anyone previously connected Ladd’s murder in Washington State to the Juetten case in Oregon? Probably not, but then these four students were killed in Idaho, 400 miles away, and suddenly the coincidence — knife-wielding attacker, early-morning hours, 13th of the month — was maybe not so coincidental. And if indeed these crimes are connected, isn’t it apparent that the killer is very methodical in his planning? He first struck in Washington State, then moved across state lines to Oregon, which would reduce the likelihood of investigators making a connection between the two crimes, and then struck 400 miles away in Idaho. If he is deliberately choosing the 13th as the date of his attacks, then he must have spent some days or weeks ahead of time, scouting out his intended victims. All of this, of course, is contingent on the “if” factor; we don’t actually know that these crimes are all connected.
Notice that all three of these crimes occurred after the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in early 2020. Did the killer find himself stuck at home — school canceled, or workplace shut down — and start binge-watching horror movies and serial-killer documentaries? Three or four months into his forced isolation, he decides to emulate one of his “heroes” by stabbing an old lady to death. He gets away with it, and more than a year later, decides it’s time to do it again. Gets away with that one, another year goes by, and he relocates to Idaho — new job? new school? — where he strikes again. All of these crimes happen on the 13th of the month, and if they are actually connected, the choice of a specific date (combined with the fact that the killer keeps getting away with it) suggests an intelligent perpetrator, capable of planning and organizing.
Of course, this is all just speculation. Unless and until the police apprehend a suspect, we don’t actually know that the Idaho murders are connected to these other cases. However, I cannot help but remark that these developments in the investigation tend to confirm Kirby’s hunch.
They didn’t send all those FBI agents out there for no reason, y’know.
Wednesday I was watching CNN (so you don’t have to) and they were still leading every hour with Tuesday night’s shooting at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia. The gunman killed six people and wounded four others before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide, shortly after police arrived. In CNN’s coverage, however, there was almost no mention of the gunman, and I had to Google to learn that police had identified him as Andre Bing, a 31-year-old who worked as team leader on the overnight shift. Co-workers said he was a weirdo:
The Walmart gunman who opened fire in the break room of the Chesapeake store where he worked last night had a list of the names of people he wished to target.
Andre Bing, 31, opened fire in the breakroom of the Walmart in Sam’s Circuit, Chesapeake, at 10.12pm last night, where 14 employees had gathered for a pre-shift meeting.
Bing’s rampage killed six people in total, including a 16-year-old boy.
In a press release Wednesday evening, the City of Chesapeake identified five of the deceased victims as Lorenzo Gamble, Brian Pendleton, Kellie Pyle, Randall Blevins, and Tyneka Johnson.
The sixth deceased victim’s name and photo was withheld due to his age, the city said. . . .
Earlier in the day, the city identified the shooter as Bing, saying he was ‘armed with one handgun and had multiple magazines on his person.’ . . .
Bing opened fire in the breakroom at the back of the store. He shot ten people before killing himself.
When police searched his body, they found a list of names that contained the names of the colleagues he wished to target, according to local Virginia outlet WAVY, citing an anonymous source. . . .
Former colleagues today described Bing as ‘weird’ and revealed he was so paranoid about being watched by the government that he taped over the camera on his phone. . . .
‘Everyone called him weird. That was all anyone could say about Andre,’ Shaundrayia Reese, who previously worked with him, told The New York Times. She added that he had a ‘nasty attitude’ – something other staff also complained about. ‘He had an attitude. He was kind of aggressive.
‘There were moments where he was OK, but he was definitely hard to work with and a little hostile,’ Nathan Sinclair, who also used to work with him, said.
None of this was mentioned on CNN, which de-emphasized the killer and instead ran with a chyron, “GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA,” but actually had Stephen Gutoski on their panel, surrounded by liberals advocating gun control. But what law could have prevented this shooting? The gunman used a common sort of pistol, not some exotic “assault rifle.” While it’s not known how he acquired the weapon, there’s no indication that he got it illegally, or that “background checks” should have prevented him from purchasing firearms. The White House issued a presidential statement: “This year, I signed the most significant gun reform in a generation, but that is not nearly enough. We must take greater action.” Well, so what? In what way would this “gun reform” have prevented the Walmart shooting? If “greater action” is needed, please tell us exactly what you have in mind, and how it’s related to what happened in this case. Which, of course, they won’t and can’t, because Democrats won’t be satisfied until Americans are completely disarmed, but they can’t say that out loud and still win elections. Meanwhile, however, this story presents yet another Case of the Disappearing Perpetrator.
If the shooter had been a white guy, especially some sort of right-wing type, the perp’s mug shot would have been featured at the top of the hour, every hour, on CNN, but instead Andre Bing is barely mentioned (and his photo never shown) in CNN’s coverage. This is your big “tell” that what they’re doing is not exactly news, but rather political propaganda on behalf of the Democratic Party. The obvious reason CNN jumped on the Virginia Walmart shooting initially was that the producers must have thought: “The South! Surely this shooter must be a redneck Bubba!”
Unfortunately for their agenda, wrong again.
They’re 0-for-2 this week on mass shootings. When a gunman stormed into a Colorado Springs gay bar and opened fire, killing five people, the media immediately leapt to the conclusion: “Hate crime!” And immediately seized on the idea that “transphobic rhetoric” by Republicans must somehow be to blame, since the club in question had hosted drag queen performances. In a New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg declared the shooting “was at once shocking and entirely predictable, like terrorist attacks on synagogues and abortion clinics.” She name-checked Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo and Ben Shapiro among those to blame for the “demonization” that she presumed led to the shooting, even though her column was published before anybody actually knew anything about the gunman or his motives.
Their brains simply can’t cope with the disappointment. So the Colorado Springs shooter will disappear down the media’s memory hole, as will the Virginia Walmart shooter, because neither of them fit the Preferred Narrative of Right-Wing Violence. These gunmen lack the necessary qualifications of significance — they don’t advance the agenda — and so they’ll be forgotten, just like Bernie Sanders fanboy James Hodgkinson has been forgotten, because most self-identified “journalists” are, indeed, just Democratic Operatives With Bylines.
In June 2021, Anderson Lee Aldrich was in an armed standoff with police at his mother’s home in Colorado Springs. He was charged with multiple felonies, but for reasons as yet unknown, the charges were dropped and records in the case were sealed. Seventeen months later, Aldrich was wearing body armor when he stormed into a local gay bar with a rifle and a pistol, shooting multiple people, five of whom died in the shooting rampage before bar patrons — one of them a former Army officer — tackled and disarmed him. People have questions:
Ring doorbell video obtained by the AP shows Aldrich arriving at his mother’s front door with a big black bag the day of the 2021 bomb threat, telling her the police were nearby and adding, “This is where I stand. Today I die.”
Two squad cars and what appears to be a bomb squad vehicle later pull up to the house, and a barefooted Aldrich emerges with his hands up.
Leslie Bowman, who owns the house where the mother lived and alerted police that day, said she was angry they didn’t do more to monitor Aldrich after the incident. “If the justice system had followed through with something, anything … he wouldn’t likely have had access to be able to get a weapon and five people wouldn’t have died,” Bowman said.
Meanwhile, people are angry at Tucker Carlson for pointing out that we don’t yet know what the gunman’s motive was. It is easy to guess that some kind of anti-gay bias may be involved — he shot up a gay bar, OK? — but speculation is not proof. Unlike some other mass shootings, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of “manifesto” associated with the Colorado Springs shootings, and if Aldrich left any kind of clues to his motive on his social media accounts, we haven’t seen that yet. And given how eager the media seem to be to portray this as a “hate crime,” don’t you think somebody would have found evidence of Aldrich’s “homophobia,” if such evidence were posted somewhere on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.?
Accused Colorado mass shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich had a troubled life growing up in California and Texas — one largely hidden by a complete name change before his 16th birthday.
Until he was 15, Anderson, now 22, was known by his birth name, Nicholas F. Brink, according to records obtained by the Washington Post. . . . His parents, Aaron Brink and Laura Voepel, separated in July 2001 when he was still a baby, and he moved around between Orange, California, and San Antonio, Texas, before settling in Colorado, the records show.
His mom . . . also had several brushes with the law, including an arrest for arson in Texas in 2012, when her son was 12, the outlet noted. She also appears to have three outstanding warrants from earlier in California, according to the Gazette. . . .
When he was 15, Brink became a target of . . . “a particularly vicious bout of online bullying.” . . .
His grandparents also appear to have been central to his disturbing arrest in June last year when he livestreamed a four-hour standoff with police after being accused of threatening to blow up his neighborhood.
Relatives told the Gazette that Aldrich flipped after finding out that his grandparents planned to leave Colorado and settle in Florida.
In a livestream of the standoff — in which he threatened to “blow it to holy hell” — he also said, “This is the day I die. They don’t give a f–k about me anymore. Clearly,” the local outlet noted.
An emotionally volatile man-baby, it would seem. Which doesn’t mean he was not also a “homophobe,” but the real question is why he wasn’t prosecuted and sent to prison, instead of the charges being dropped.
In new court filing, public defenders for the suspect in the mass shooting at a Colorado gay club that left 5 people dead say that their client is non-binary and that "they use they/them pronouns." The lawyers refer to their client as Mx. Anderson Aldrich. pic.twitter.com/dPaUpiFXKN
Suppose that you’re a major Silicon Valley venture capitalist, someone entrusted to invest vast sums of other people’s money in new enterprises. Don’t you have an obligation, as due diligence, to research the people running the companies you’re funding? Because now I’m imagining a courtroom trial in a lawsuit brought by people who entrusted their savings to whatever VC funders decided that investing money in a company run by Sam Bankman-Fried‘s girlfriend was a good idea.
*** (Spoiler alert: It was not a good idea.) ***
The story of how Caroline Ellison ended up as CEO of Alameda Research, the company from which Bankman-Fried (known as “SBF”) spun off the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is eventually going to be a major motion picture, the “happy ending” of which is going to be these people going to prison (if they don’t conveniently commit suicide, as sometimes happens to people who become “problematic” to the Democratic Party). Meanwhile, investors around the world — including many who had no idea their money had been invested in this blatant Ponzi scheme run by a clique of Gen Z geeks — are certain to become plaintiffs in a class-action suit against investment firms like Sequoia Capital, who ignored so many red flags about SBF’s operation. Just two months ago, Sequoia “published a long, meandering profile of Sam Bankman-Fried, a.k.a. SBF, the now-disgraced founder of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX. The article, ‘Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex — And Maybe You Should Too,’ ran to an eye-glazing 14,000 words and featured flowery prose that looked especially ridiculous after FTX’s spectacular collapse.”
Sequoia deleted that article from their website, but not before somebody archived it, so you can get the full taste of enthusiastic gushing over SBF’s “epiphany” about pursuing “effective altruism,” which inspired him to quit his job as a trader at Jane Street Capital and eventually launch Alameda Research in 2017, before creating FTX in 2019. This is where Caroline Ellison enters the story. Whereas SBF is the son of two Stanford Law professors and attended MIT, Ellison is the daughter of an MIT professor and attended Stanford. (See “Assortative Mating” in The Bell Curve, pp. 110-113. Certainly Charles Murray would have something interesting to say about this.) Ellison worked at Jane Street Capital with Bankman-Fried and, like her boyfriend, Ellison became a devotee of “effective altruism.” From the 14,000-word article:
Caroline Ellison, a friend and colleague who was trading on the equities desk at Jane Street during that time, remembers the moment well. “It was unusual,” she says, “because he decided to quit — not to do anything in particular, but just under the premise that there were a lot of other options out there.” . . .
Ellison is a freckle-faced redhead with a personality that splits the difference between bubbly and nerd-ball. She’s partial to a pair of designer frames that make her look a bit like Edna Mode, the superhero stylist in The Incredibles.
About six months after SBF dropped out, Jane Street sent Ellison on a recruiting trip to California, so she decided to call on her old friend. They’d been office buddies at Jane, but they’d also occasionally socialized outside of work, too, being fellow EA acolytes.
(And by “occasionally socialized outside of work,” of course they mean, MAKING THE BEAST WITH TWO BACKS, but continue . . .)
Ellison wanted to catch up, but from the get-go, SBF was acting uncharacteristically shifty. There were several canceled coffee dates, and when the two finally did get together — at Jumpin’ Java, an old-school Berkeley coffeehouse with hand-painted murals on the wall and whimsical art in the windows—SBF evaded even the most innocuous of questions.
“So,” Ellison asked after joining SBF at a table, “what have you been up to in the last few months?” Ellison, it should be noted, was dressed as a sultry wood nymph — she was on her way to a LARP (Live Action Role Play) party. . . .
(Permit me to interrupt: She was “DRESSED AS A SULTRY WOOD NYMPH”? The future CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company was LARPing? As a WOOD NYMPH? Words fail . . .)
The story was pretty remarkable. After SBF quit Jane Street, he moved back home to the Bay Area, where Will MacAskill had offered him a job as director of business development at the Centre for Effective Altruism. He rented a modest apartment near CEA HQ in Berkeley, he still had a couple of weeks to just explore before his job started. This was his first vacation in, well, ever. In the years working at Jane, SBF had never taken any significant time off.
He spent his vacation just soaking everything in: It was his first time in the Bay Area as an adult, and he found his home turf unexpectedly thrilling. It was where all the new technology was. It was where all the startups were. It was where the bulk of the EA community was starting to congregate. SBF ended up hanging out a lot with his younger brother Gabe, who was living in an EA commune on nearby Stuart Street.
At that time, everyone in the tech world was talking about crypto. In the Bay Area, you couldn’t escape the chatter. . . .
To cut a long story short, SBF discovered that Asian markets were selling crypto at significantly higher prices than in the U.S., figured out how to take advantage of that spread, invested $50,000 of his own money into this project, quickly increased that, then secured $50 million in funding to start Alameda Research:
With a goosed-up capital account, the money started piling up so fast that SBF placed what he refers to as “a market order for employees” to tend to the Rube Goldberg operation that kept the capital spinning. There were constant blowups with banks, which are wary of anything crypto. Crypto was so new that regulators in South Korea and elsewhere were constantly changing their mind about regulations—then making those changes retroactive. It was a swirling mess. Pulled into the vortex was Nishad Singh, a friend of SBF’s brother Gabe, and a fellow EA member. Singh is a bespectacled and baby-faced young man with an earnest mien. He often wears a T-shirt with the words “compassionate to the core” printed, in a diminutive all-lowercase font, over his heart. After just one conversation with SBF, Singh decided to leave Facebook to take on the more meaningful work of building FTX. Caroline Ellison came, too, quitting Jane Street and moving to California only weeks after SBF described the operation to her over tea. The first 15 people SBF hired, all from the EA pool, were packed together in a shabby, 600-square-foot walk-up, working around the clock. The kitchen was given over to stand-up desks, the closet was reserved for sleeping, and the entire space overrun with half-eaten take-out containers. It was a royal mess. But it was also the good old days, when Alameda was just kids on a high-stakes, big-money, earn-to-give commando operation. Fifty percent of Alameda’s profits were going to EA-approved charities. . . .
Or so we are expected to believe. Turns out that there are people in the “effective altrusm” community who have heard tales of abusive behavior by Bankman-Fried during the 2017-2019 early years of Alameda Research, which led several employees to quit. So the assertion that SBF was donating 50% of his profits to “EA-approved charities” is something for which I’ll have to see the receipts before I’ll believe it.
Going from obscure nerd to Fortune magazine cover boy in just five years was, it must be admitted, a remarkable feat. His “effective altruism” shtick was a major factor in SBF’s celebrity, as was the fact that he became the second-largest contributor of campaign cash to the Democratic Party. Nobody seems to have thought this was suspicious and, similarly, the connection between the currency exchange FTX and the trading firm Alameda Research also failed to raise concerns. Is putting your girlfriend in charge of a multibillion enterprise really a good idea? What ultimately crashed SBF’s empire was the fact — which both Bankman-Fried and Ellison have admitted — that SBF “loaned” funds from FTX customers to Alameda, to the tune of $10 billion. But if Alameda was successful, why would it need such a “loan”?
When asked about the blurred lines between his companies in August, Bankman-Fried denied any conflict of interest and said FTX was a “neutral piece of market infrastructure.”
“I put a lot of work over the last few years into trying to eliminate conflicts of interest there,” 30-year-old Bankman-Fried told CNBC in an interview. “I don’t run Alameda anymore. I don’t work for it, none of FTX does. We have separate staffs — we don’t want to have preferential treatment. We want as best as we can, to treat everyone fairly.” . . .
Three sources familiar with the company told CNBC that [employees] were blindsided by the company’s actions and that, to their knowledge, only a small cohort knew that customer deposits were being misused. Employees said in some cases, their life savings are tied up on FTX.
“We’re just shocked and devastated,” a current FTX employee said. “I feel like I’m in a movie that’s playing out in real time. No one saw this coming.”
As a result of the public backlash FTX has faced over these missing funds, employees who say they were just as devastated as customers are now facing financial hardship, harassment surrounding their involvement with the company, and tarnished future employment prospects.
“We could not believe how we were being betrayed,” a former employee said.
— CNBC, Nov. 13
This operation had more red flags than a May Day parade in Beijing, but nobody seemed to notice any problems with FTX/Alameda when Bankman-Fried’s empire was the hottest firm in the hottest “emerging” sector of the economy. What we can now call The Crypto Bubble never really made sense from an economic perspective. It was mainly popular because it was unregulated, a sort of anarchist pirate kingdom based on a theory of implied value that appealed to the kind of people who frequent unregulated digital gaming platforms like no KYC casinos and talk a lot about “fiat currency” and “Jekyll Island” (nudge, nudge). I mean, I get it — in an ideal world, I’d be a goldbug fanatic, but we’re not living in an ideal world, and I am skeptical of the promise that cryptocurrency is the road to Utopia. Meanwhile, in the real world, the crypto king SBF was living in a $40-million penthouse in the Bahamas with 10 of his dorky minions in some kind of polyamorous cult situation.
The handle of her blog was “worldoptimization” — a reference to her goal as a devotee of “effective altruism” — and someone has archived the whole thing back to 2014, when Ellison was still a college student, and interested in a lot of right-wing ideas, including “human biodiversity” (abbreviated HBD, popularized by Steve Sailer). Ellison had been raised Catholic, but turned atheist as a teenager, and considered herself part of the “trad” (traditionalist) movement of women who rejected feminist promises of “sexual liberation.” There has been a lot of ignorant and biased commentary about Ellison’s blog, accusing her of endorsing pseudoscientific “race science,” etc., but after skimming over it pretty heavily, I think these critiques are missing the main point: What kind of adult has a Tumblr blog? Answer: Not the healthy kind.
As crazy as Twitter can be, at least there are verifiably sane people who use Twitter, which cannot be said for Tumblr, the Internet’s Quasi-Official Lunatic Asylum. And when you read what Ellison was posting there, you discover that she was, for example, a fan of The Bachelor series. Do you really want someone like that running a multibillion-dollar trading company? No, you don’t. Her Tumblr blog reveals Caroline Ellison to be a fundamentally silly person, obsessed with trivial nonsense.
Some regular readers may be saying, “Wait a minute, Stacy. Aren’t you kind of ‘fundamentally silly’ yourself?” Yes, of course, but I am a mere journalist. I’m not running a gigantic financial company — and thank God for that, because I’d probably botch it at least as badly as Caroline Ellison has botched it. However, I’d botch it in a more traditional way — a scandal involving strippers, cocaine, Lamborghinis, etc. — not wasting my time blabbing about The Bachelor on a Tumblr blog.
In a sane world, the venture capitalists who gave investors’ money to Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison would be ritually humiliated — lashed and pilloried — if not indeed hanged in the public square. But we don’t live in a sane world, so they’ll escape the brutal justice they deserve.
