In The Mailbox: 03.11.25

Posted on | March 12, 2025 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.11.25

Considering updating my post “We Have Always Been The Party of No” post from a few years back, which Google can’t seem to find…is there any interest in that?
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.
OVER THE TRANSOM
Director Blue: Top 20 Arabella Network Revelations
EBL: Ice Cold Catch, J.D. Vance Is Everywhere, Battle of the Aegates Islands, House of David, and The Benevolent Dictators : Silent Revolution
Twitchy: Move Over 9/11, There’s Something Scarier, The (Bad) Luck of the Irish, and Are Taxpayers Footing The Bill For Occasional Cortex’s Dance Classes?
Louder With Crowder: Blue-haired mom defends trans “daughter” being in the locker room because “90% of the time it’s flaccid”, A California council woman’s illegal immigrant husband (with a criminal record) gets deported, and she doesn’t handle it well, Alejandro Mayorkas resurfaces, declares he’s “very proud” of Biden’s open border policies, Pro-Ukraine protestors accost JD Vance’s 3-year-old daughter while out with her dad, yet Vance still responds with class, and Former NIH director drops the newest CRINGE leftist protest anthem at something called the “Stand Up For Science” rally
Vox Popoli: Resurrecting the Iron Curtain, Odds and False Ends, Bond. Jane Bond, Fake Democracy in France, and Projecting on Putin
The Bugscuffle Gazette: Throwback Post, One Of My Better Works, and We Read History Books,
Bacon Time: Steak & Shake
Upstream Reviews: Fountable 1,
Defending The Wood Perilous: Go, Grok, Go!
Gab: Censorship Demands From Israel
Toni Airaksinen: Harvard Finally Fires Librarian Who Tore Down Jewish Hostage Posters

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Baldilocks: Can We Set The Captive(s) Free?
CDR Salamander: Mid-March Midrats Melee, also, Japan Gets CG(X) Right
Don Surber: Can’t spell Triumph without Trump,
Protein Wisdom Reborn: Notes from a cluttered mind
STUMP: The Week In Meep – Death To DST,

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Category: Linkagery

Rule 5 Sunday: South American Cowgirl

Posted on | March 10, 2025 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: South American Cowgirl

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I really need to take better notes on who these gals are and where I find them on X.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

Colombia? Brazil? Argentina? Yo no se.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Ask Animal Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, Surprised By Oxford, “Little Latin Lupe Lu”, Cabrini, Homestead, MAGA – President Trump’s Speech To Congress, Dolly Parton’s Husband Carl Dean RIP, Brave Dark, and The Last Rifleman

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Ainsley Rodriguez, Gone Fishin’, Fish Pic Friday – Riley Kolich, You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive, Chesapeake Bay Salmon, Revisited, The Wednesday Wetness, Tattoo Tuesday, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Random Celebrity News and Palm Sunday

FLAPPR: Serious Matters & Unfolding Trends For March

BACON TIME: Rule 5 – A Trip To Hooterville

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Category: Rule 5

The ‘Investigative Journalist’ Grift and the Dangerous ‘Viral’ Style of Ian Carroll

Posted on | March 9, 2025 | Comments Off on The ‘Investigative Journalist’ Grift and the Dangerous ‘Viral’ Style of Ian Carroll

Y’all remember Barrett Brown, don’t you? He first popped onto my radar in late 2009. Just about the time I was finished with the Charles Johnson/LGF affair, Barrett Brown decides to do some kind of thing “exposing” me as a dangerous neo-Confederate white supremacist, to which my basic response was: I’m watching you, boy. About three years later, after he had made a name for himself as the spokesman for the “Anonymous” hacker conspiracy, Barrett Brown had a meltdown on YouTube, threatening an FBI agent and eventually earning himself a stint in federal prison. We don’t hear much about Barrett Brown these days; last year he published a memoir that didn’t do anything to revive his career as a self-proclaimed “investigative journalist.” Anyway . . .

So everybody now is talking about Ian Carroll, who was a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week, and the chatter on X was sufficiently annoying that I found myself wondering, “Who the fuck is this guy?”

Good luck finding any actual biography of Ian Carroll. You can find denunciations of him, or find hagiography of him, but like the basic stuff — age, hometown, education, career background — just doesn’t seem to exist. If you can turn it up with a Google search, please put the result in the comments. Meanwhile, this is from a Substack article about him:

“I was a GameStop investor right after that initial short squeeze moment in the limelight,” he says in a sit-down interview with Robert Breedlove. “And I was pretty ignorant, like I was just a dude snowboarding, and rock climbing, and running around the woods up in the Northwest with political opinions that were given to me that I didn’t really have any basis for.” His journey into investigative journalism only took root when events such as Covid-19, the 2020 elections, and the GameStop ordeal primed him to question everything. From the corruption of the financial system, the concentration of power in a handful of news media conglomerates, and how the whole market is built out of lies, Carroll’s passions quickly shifted away from his teaching background toward wanting to help disseminate all of the information he was independently learning with an engaged audience.
While many investigative journalists are known to privately conduct research into a particular topic of interest before organizing and publishing their findings in a column, book, or commentary that informs readers and viewers alike, Carroll’s process is a little different. And that may be the reason why his research intensive work rapidly amassed approximately 300,000 followers per month in his first few months of sharing his deep-dives on TikTok.

In an era when what gets labeled a “conspiracy theory” this week turns out to be established fact next week, we can understand the market demand for “deep dives on TikTok” about such topics, but excuse me for noticing the resemblance between Ian Carroll’s oeuvre and the kind of stuff you used to see in Lyndon Larouche pamphlets. It cannot be classified as “right” or “left,” reflecting a worldview (and appealing to an audience) that is not ideologically coherent, defined mainly by an attitude of suspicion. Some might label it “populist,” but as I consider myself a populist, I don’t want to get lumped into a category with this stuff.

It’s easy to go “viral” on TikTok if you look like you’re auditioning for the role of Jack Sparrow in a remake of Pirates of the Caribbean, OK? And Ian Carroll has a regular-guy vibe that is appealing — up until you realize he is describing Israel as Jeffrey Epstein’s “handlers.”

See, Pam Bondi is part of the Zionist plot to conceal the REAL TRUTH that Jeffrey Epstein was an “asset” of the Mossad, and insofar as you refuse to agree with this claim, you’re part of the cover-up, too!

Do I know what may be in the FBI’s Epstein files? No, I don’t, and neither does Ian Carroll, but he’s read a book by Whitney Webb that purports to expose links between Epstein and the “intelligence community,” which for all I know may actually be the case, but isn’t it a stretch to claim that U.S. aid to Israel constitutes payment to Esptein’s “handlers”?

Much of the speculation around Epstein stems from a 2019 article by Vicky Ward in the Daily Beast. It involves Alexander Acosta, who was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in the George W. Bush administration, and who became Secretary of Labor in the first Trump administration. Acosta was the federal prosecutor who made what was called a “sweetheart deal” with Epstein in 2007, under which federal charges were dropped in exchange for Epstein agreeing to plead guilty to two state charges in Florida, for which he served a total of 13 months in county jail. Vicky Ward had “spent many months” in 2002 working on a Vanity Fair story about Epstein, and says her publisher Graydon Carter was pressured directly by Epstein to exclude from the resulting feature article any mention of Epstein’s notorious sexual appetites.

Ward’s 2019 Daily Beast article begins thus:

A couple of years ago, I was interviewing a former senior White House official when the name Jeffrey Epstein came up.
Unaware of my personal history with Epstein, this person assured me that the New York financier was no serious harm to anyone. He was a good guy. A charming guy. Useful, too. He knew a lot of rich Arabs, including the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and, further, he had clever ideas about creating bond issues for them. “OK, so he has a girl problem,” this person threw on, almost as an afterthought.
Epstein’s name, I was told, had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who’d infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary. The plea deal put a hard stop to a separate federal investigation of alleged sex crimes with minors and trafficking.
“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta.

Pause for a minute and think about 2019. This was three years after Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton and, for a lot of people, the name Jeffrey Epstein was associated with Bill Clinton. The Democrat pushback against any attempt by Republicans to exploit this scandal was to point out that it was under a Republican administration (George W. Bush) that Epstein got his “sweetheart deal,” and Alexander Acosta’s role in that deal eventually forced him to resign as Trump’s Labor Secretary. So part of what Ward was doing with this 2019 article — published just after Epstein was again arrested on sex-trafficking charges — was making sure that everybody remembered that Republican angle to the story.

Now look closely at the sourcing of Ward’s story — it is at best third-hand, involving an unnamed “former senior White House official,” who says that this business about how somebody told Acosta that Epstein “belonged to intelligence” was what Acosta told “the Trump transition team” when they’d asked him about the plea deal circa 2016-2017.

There is a reason why hearsay is inadmissable as evidence in court.

Vicky Ward’s source says Acosta says somebody told him Epstein was “intelligence,” and that’s why Epstein got his “sweetheart deal.”

This may actually be true, of course, but it’s not proof.

Far be it from me to deny that in 2007, when Epstein and his lawyers were desperate to get him off the hook, they played every card they had in their hands, leveraging every connection Epstein had made over the years of his association with powerful people. Could it be that someone in the “intelligence community” (e.g., John Brennan) exerted pressure on the Justice Department to go easy on Epstein because of whatever value he had as an “asset”? Certainly this is possible, but there is a lack of specificity to the story as we have it. Who was it that told Acosta “Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”? Has this person ever been identified by name? Has some congressional committee called Acosta to testify under oath about this? If so, how did I miss that?

Maybe there’s something in Whitney Webb’s book that nails this down, but excuse my skepticism, because if it were known as a fact that Epstein’s “intelligence” value was behind that 2007 plea deal, I’m pretty sure the full story — naming names, citing court documents — would be atop the results for any Google search on the subject.

Look, I spent a decade as an assistant editor on the national desk at The Washington Times and know a thing or two about investigative journalism, OK? At times, my job was to serve as a go-between with reporters and senior editors. My bosses would read the draft of a story and say, “Hey, we need more to back this up — can we get a source to go on the record?” So I’d go back to the reporter to explain this problem, and see what could be done, then go back to my bosses to let them know the situation — were we going to have the story nailed down in time for the next day’s paper, or should it be taken off the schedule? Based on that experience, I can assure you that if I had OK’d a story as thinly sourced as Vicky Ward’s tale about Acosta and the “intelligence” angle on Esptein, Wes Pruden would have fired me and kicked me down the stairs.

The whole thing hangs on an anonymous source telling a story he claims to have heard second-hand — Wes Pruden would not be amused.

How far is it from actual investigative journalism to what Ian Carroll is doing with his TikTok videos claiming that Pam Bondi is engaged in a cover-up to protect Epstein’s Israeli “handlers”? Sure, you can get a lot of online traffic making claims like that, especially with your Pirates of the Caribbean look and your regular-guy “just asking questions” style, but it’s not really journalism. Part of the problem, of course, is that the mainstream media have so damaged their own credibility that the entire business of journalism is in disrepute. When the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Associated Press have all been exposed as partisan propaganda operations, who can you trust? If many thousands of people put their faith in a “viral” TikTok video by a guy making shadowy insinuations about “Zionists,” whose fault is that?

I’m one of a handful of people who both (a) once worked for Wes Pruden and (b) was personal friends with Andrew Breitbart, and when you add in (c) my @rsmccain account was one of the first banned by Twitter — and still banned to this day — my credentials as an alternative media personality are pretty solid. So why am I not chatting with Joe Rogan?

Am I the victim of a conspiracy? Are they — and you know who they are, right? — trying to suppress the truth? Maybe I should start posting TikTok videos blaming the Mossad and the CIA for every random nuisance in my life. Unfortunately, I don’t have that swashbuckling Pirates of the Caribbean look, and my voice is an Appalachian twang, so there’s zero chance of my becoming a “viral” TikTok sensation.

Instead, I’m here where I’ve always been, and I’m worried that people on “our” side (because, whatever his faults, Ian Carroll is on the MAGA bandwagon) are doing an “edgy” thing of flirting with Jew-haters because that’s how you attract alienated young people in an era when pro-Hamas rallies are all the rage in the Ivy League. This is dangerous, and while I try to avoid playing “hate speech” hall-monitor (being hate-listed by the SPLC myself), nevertheless I am not blind to what’s going on.

People need to wake the hell up. The stakes are very high.

UPDATE: One thing we must be aware of is that “ops” are going on everywhere, all the time. If it’s not the CIA running an op, it’s MI5, or the GRU, or various Chinese agencies, etc. That whole thing about “Russian interference” in the 2016 election was a sort of meta-op — an op about an op — and it can be difficult to know if today’s “News” is actually somebody’s propaganda operation. At times I wonder if some of the commenters on this blog are actually foreign intelligence operatives, as for example the one below who says this:

Whitney Webb has never done any research. She simply does a copy and paste of Ryan Dawson’s work amd calls it her own. Israel is a criminal enerprise and a virulent enemy of the United States. There are reams of publicly available documents proving this.
If you give half a shit about the truth, you can find Dawson’s work and learn something about this subject.

Ah, so I could “learn something” from the work of Ryan Dawson. Well, let me see what Ryan Dawson has to say, for example:

Or this, for example:

Ryan Dawson is a fair and objective reporter, said nobody ever.

Let me encourage readers to investigate for themselves exactly who Ryan Dawson is. The accusation that Whitney Webb has been doing “a copy and paste of Ryan Dawson’s work” is certainly interesting, and by “interesting,” of course I mean, potentially libelous.

Maybe I should order Whitney Webb’s books from Amazon, and see whether it’s fair to accuse her of plagiarizing a Holocaust denier, but the real point I wish to make is that we do not know what other people’s motives are. If Jeffrey Epstein was on the Mossad’s payroll, who else is on the payrolls of foreign intelligence agencies? And if some journalists are actually paid government operatives (which is what the USAID revelations seem to show), then shouldn’t we be suspicious when a guy nobody ever heard of before 2020 suddenly becomes a “viral” phenomenon by repeating wild conspiracy theories? Some of y’all may be overdue for the 30,000-mile maintenance checkup on your bullshit detectors, but mine is quite finely tuned, thank you.

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Category: Conspiracy Theories

FMJRA 2.0: Return to Mediocrity

Posted on | March 9, 2025 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Return to Mediocrity

— compiled by Wombat-socho

SOTD
Took two out of three from the Daytraders at Lida Junction on the way back to Tonopah Tuesday; Pat Dobson got one of his two wins this week and Coleman evened up his record at 6-6. Didn’t do so well against the Twins on Friday, losing two very close games before our hitters lit up Stan Bahnsen for eight runs in a blowout that earned Dobson his second win. This puts us at 27-34, a game and a half ahead of the A’s and ten games behind the division-leading Red Sox. We face the Cardinals for the first time on Tuesday.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

Why Has the ‘Valuable Resource’ Known as 538 Been Summarily Discarded?
Instapundit
First Street Journal
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach

Zelenskyy Self-Destructed, So Why Are Media Acting Like Trump Is to Blame?
The Pirate’s Cove
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: A Rare Winning Week
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Ain’t I Done Told Y’all? Democrats Pushed Zelenskyy to Sabotage White House Deal
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Rule 5 Sunday: Denim on the Beach
A View From The Beach
EBL

Oscar Winner Decides to ‘Recognize and Honor the Sex Worker Community’
The Daley Gator
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.04.25
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Tuesday Speech YUGE Win for Trump; Democrats Self-Destruct on Live TV
The Daley Gator
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.05.25 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.06.25 (Morning Edition)
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach

In The Mailbox: 03.06.25 (Evening Edition)
EBL
357 Magnum

BUSTED: ‘Anti-Poverty’ Democrat Activist Joe Sanberg Accused of Massive Fraud
EBL
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A View From The Beach

In The Mailbox: 03.07.25
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach

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Category: FMJRA Award

In The Mailbox: 03.07.25

Posted on | March 8, 2025 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.07.25

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: When Seconds Count, Police Are Hours Away
Director Blue: The Evolution of Corruption
EBL: Bald Eagle Cams, also, Mark Steyn Got Some Good News in the Mann Case
Twitchy: Hackmans’ Cause Of Death Revealed But Mysteries Remain, SC Murderer Becomes First Executed By Firing Squad Since 2010, and DC Mayor Bowser’s Sanctuary Stance Vanishes Faster Than A Politician’s Promise
Louder With Crowder: Donald Trump obliterates that cringetastic Democrat “fighter” video in the most MAGA way possible, Elon Musk needs only six words to SAVAGE the Democrats’ latest silly attack (and attacker) against him, Trump demands MSNBC host “be forced to resign” for wretched thing she said about a MAGA-loving teenage cancer survivor, Dem tries defending “Choose Your Fighter” video to Scott Jennings, gets lesson in politics instead, and Joe Rogan, Andrew Schulz switch off wrecking the left’s attempts to build their own podcast network
Vox Popoli: Closing the Kursk Pocket, HBO Reimagines Harry Potter, Diversity Enhances the German Experience, We are the Ghost Dancers, and Is Japan Next?
According To Hoyt: I’m alive, True Tragedy, Possess Your Soul In Patience, and In Which I Go MAHA!
Upstream Reviews: Endless Summer
The Bugscuffle Gazette: Interview,
Postcards rom Barsoom: Reenchanting The Canadian Culture War
Gab: The Real
Stoic Observations: How Zen Is Stoic

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: How to Confront the Demonic Homosexual Agenda
American Conservative: The Ukraine War’s Finale is Upsetting—but Trump Isn’t to Blame
American Greatness: Secretary Kelly Loeffler to Move SBA Offices Out of Sanctuary Cities, also, Retooling Schooling
American Thinker: The Democrats Descend into Madness
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Ask Animal Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For March 7
Behind The Black: Webb captures infrared view of a baby binary star system and its bi-polar jets, French official lauds Ariane 6 launch; demands Europe have its own launch capability, India’s Vikram lunar lander data suggests there could be more water impregnated in more places on the Moon, Intuitive Machines confirms Athena fell over at landing; ends mission, and Once again the leftist propaganda press takes out its knives to stab SpaceX and Musk
Cafe Hayek: Yep
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Chicago Boyz: History Friday – The Other Alamo
Dana Loesch: Gavin Newsom Is Running,
Don Surber: Trumping the bureaucracy
First Street Journal: Not everything has to be a federal government project!
Gates Of Vienna: The Stabby News From Germany, It’s a Dangerous Business, Selling Travel Tickets, and Don’t You Dare Complain About the Knives!
The Geller Report: ActBlue in CHAOS: Democrat Money Laundering Giant is Imploding As Top Staff Rush For The Exits, Israel Rescues TEN Indian Men Held Hostage By Muslim Terrorists in Judea Samaria, Autopen Was Running the Country During Biden Years, RAMADAN KILLATHON – Muslim Terrorists in Syria Are Slaughtering Christians, Druze, Dragging Their Bodies Through the Streets, and UK Muslim Groups Reject Interfaith Pact With Jewish Leaders
Hollywood In Toto: Anti-Capitalism Mickey 17 Set to Lose Millions at Box Office, also, Will Kennedy Center Survive Trump Derangement Syndrome?
The Lid: Joe Biden Didn’t Personally Sign Many of His Executive Orders, So WHO was Running the White House?
Legal Insurrection: State Department Revokes First Visa of Foreign Student Linked to Anti-Israel Protests, Independent Audit Shows Los Angeles Can’t Account For $2.5 Billion Supposedly Directed to Combat Homelessness, The Democratic Party Must Adapt or Go Extinct, DHS Identifies Two People Accused of Leaking ICE Raid Info to Public, and Did Biden Nix Plans for SpaceX to Bring Boeing Starliner Astronauts Home Sooner?
Nebraska Energy Observer: Remember how education was back in the day? Listen to this and you’ll know
Outkick: Ole Miss Has To Pay Tennessee A Massive Amount After Storming The Court, Throwing Object Onto Court, A’s, Rays Stadium Situations Are MLB Failures, Charles Barkley Defends Wayne Gretzky From Canadian “Fools”, Geno Smith Traded To Raiders To Reunite With Pete Carroll While Seahawks Look To Sam Darnold, and Caitlin Clark’s New MAGA Teammate Goes Backroadin’ In A Bikini, Maggie Sajak On Island Time & Queer Wildlife!
Power Line: Other People’s Money, Columbia Pays a Price, Feeding Our Fraud: On Lake Street, and Thoughts from the ammo line
Shark Tank: Pedophile & Murderer Wants Death Row Reprieve Due To Health Problems
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday: The Politics of Henry Kissinger
This Ain’t Hell: Vets – “not fit to have a job”? and Covid update, Florida Cracks Down on Stolen Valor for Officials, and Valor Friday
Transterrestrial Musings: The Growing Business Of Space, also, Utterly Compelling Historical Research
Victory Girls: Ratings Nosedive Earned For MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace
Watts Up With That: Driving a Stake Through Stakeholder Capitalism, The Coal Fleet Can Underpin the Energy Abundance Agenda, Scotland’s Last Oil Refinery to Close – Giving the Lie to Miliband’s Net Zero Jobs Claim, The AI Age Begins – Texas ERCOT Slammed with 99GW of New Energy Demand, and Texas is going big on desalination
The Federalist: As Faith In Judicial System Falters, The Battle Against Weaponized Justice Heats Up, ABC Shuts Down 538, Pro-Leftist Polling Site That Claimed Harris Had Better Chance Than Trump, Trump Should Ignore A Supreme Court That Won’t Defend The Constitution, Court Rules Democrat Secretary Fontes Sidestepped Arizona Law When Drafting Election Rulebook, and If The Biden Family Business Was Built On Anything But Access, It Would Be Thriving
Mark Steyn: Suitless in Sukatown, Oscar with the Carmen Touch, Mrs. Miniver – The Best Propaganda Money Could Buy, The Continental, and Of Courts and Corkers

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Category: Linkagery

BUSTED: ‘Anti-Poverty’ Democrat Activist Joe Sanberg Accused of Massive Fraud

Posted on | March 7, 2025 | Comments Off on BUSTED: ‘Anti-Poverty’ Democrat Activist Joe Sanberg Accused of Massive Fraud

Joe Sanberg

Veteran blogger Lawrence Person has a long post examining the (alleged) $145 million scam (allegedly) perpetrated by Joe Sanberg, who at one point was considered a “rising star” in the Democratic Party and even talked about as a potential presidential candidate. The extra use of “allegedly” in my lead is necessitated by the fact that, unlike most accused criminals I write about, Joe Sanberg has fat stacks of cash and many influential connections, so I wouldn’t want to risk a libel suit by stating as a fact that he is guilty — GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY!

The safest thing is to quote the Department of Justice:

SANTA ANA, California — Joseph Neal Sanberg, 45, of Orange, the co-founder and largest shareholder of the financial and sustainability services company Aspiration Partners, Inc., was arrested today on a federal criminal complaint alleging that he conspired to defraud two investor funds of at least $145 million.
Sanberg’s coconspirator, Ibrahim Ameen AlHusseini, 51, of Venice, pleaded guilty today to an information charging him with wire fraud for falsifying documents and information to assist Sanberg. According to his plea agreement, signed on February 7, 2025, and unsealed today, AlHusseini personally received approximately $12.3 million in payments from the scheme. AlHusseini is scheduled for sentencing on September 29, 2025. . . .
AlHusseini was arrested on a criminal complaint on October 7, 2024, and has been released on bond since November 13, 2024. That criminal complaint was previously dismissed against AlHusseini to facilitate his cooperation in the prosecution of others, including Sanberg. . . .
According to the complaint against Sanberg and AlHusseini’s plea agreement, Sanberg obtained $145 million in loans secured by AlHusseini, who Sanberg knew did not have sufficient financial assets to cover those loans if Sanberg defaulted. Sanberg hid this fact from investors, then defaulted on the loans, which resulted in at least a $145 million in losses.

The (alleged) scam was complicated, and you don’t really care about the details anyway. The key takeaway is that Sanberg’s partner Al Husseini has already copped a plea and “flipped” to be a witness for the prosecution, which is very bad news for Sanberg.

Ibrahim Ameen Al Husseini

By the way, did you notice the dates here? Al Husseini was arrested in October. He was released on bond a few days after the election and he signed a plea deal about three weeks after Trump was inaugurated. My hunch is that the arrival of the New Sheriff in Town had a powerful persuasive influence in getting Al Husseini to strike a deal with the feds, because can you imagine how bad it would be for him if he’d waited until Pam Bondi got her people into the prosecutor’s office?

Also, isn’t America a great country? Where else can you find a Jew and an Arab cooperating in a scam to defraud Hollywood big shots of millions of dollars? (Allegedly, I hasten to add.) In the Middle East, Jews and Arabs are killing each other; in America, they’re making a killing with a financial scam dressed up in climate-friendly social justice rhetoric, attracting “investment” from stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Cindy Crawford, Drake and Robert Downey Jr.

Did I mention these two were Democrat “megadonors”?

Since 2009, Sanberg has contributed more than $370,000 to Democratic campaigns and allied progressive committees, financial disclosures reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show. In 2020 alone, he shelled out over $50,000 to the Biden Victory Fund and another $10,000 for the progressive Justice Democrats PAC.
AlHusseini, who was a CodePink board member at the time of his October arrest, is a fellow Democratic megadonor who’s donated more than $200,000 since 2020 alone.

OK, so a bunch of rich movie stars got ripped off, and the two Democrat “megadonors” are now looking at long federal prison sentences. As far as I’m concerned, that’s Making America Great Again.

Joe Sanberg was connected to a lot of important people. For example, about 10 years ago, he was making his pitch in Alaska “at the Campbell Lake home of Alice Rogoff,” whose husband, David Rubenstein, is head of the Carlyle Group. Sanberg was described as a “friend” of their daughter Ellie Rubenstein (they attended Harvard together), and if you start going down all those various rabbit holes, you’ll find some strange things. For example, Alice Rogoff was friends with Ghislaine Maxwell.

Probably just another random coincidence . . .

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

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Category: Crime, Democrats

In The Mailbox: 03.06.25 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | March 7, 2025 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.06.25 (Evening Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Anti-Oil Protestors Sabotage Electric SUVs
EBL: T. S. Eliot reading Ash Wednesday, Cabrini, and The Siege and Battle of the Alamo: Day 13
Twitchy: Cowardly Journalist Who Never Left His Desk Mocks Marine That Did, Gov. Hairgel Flatters Charlie Kirk To Fake Normalcy But His Kid Sees Through The Sham, and Pete Buttigieg Discovers Egg Prices, Pretends He Didn’t Help Scramble The Market
Louder With Crowder: Congresswomen want you to believe they’re fighters in the cringiest Democrat video you’ll see this week, Green Day changes a popular song lyric to launch a slur at JD Vance – Billie Joe Armstrong should look in the mirror, If you thought America’s newest Secret Service agent stole the show last night, see what he did to Trump in the Oval Office, Karoline Leavitt pulls NO PUNCHES calling out Democrats for their embarrassing behavior during Trump’s address, and CNN Is shocked – SHOCKED – over the massive support Americans have for DOGE
Vox Popoli: Recap, Not Revolution, The Books Must Flow, Import the Third World, Become the Third World, The End of the Department of Education, and THE ONLY SKULL is out
Cedar Sanderson: Ian Fleming & SOE’s Operation Postmaster
The Bugscuffle Gazette: Plasma Pulp!

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Stephen Wells against the White Liberal enemies, Lent and what it means, and The Demonic Aboriginal Industry
American Conservative: A Night of Triumph for Trump, Hegseth Halts Cyberattack Operations on Russia, Yes, Zelensky Is a Dictator, and What Is Realistic in Ukraine?
American Greatness: Dressing for the Role: Zelensky, Polonius, and the Theater of Politics, DEI Was the Biggest Con of the Century, House Votes to Advance Censure of Al Green Over Trump Speech Disruption, and Trump Administration Considering Criminal Referrals Against USAID Over Wasteful Spending
American Thinker: Trump Is On The Verge Of Ending The EPA’s Tyranny, Make Alberta America, The Trump Speech and the Conservative Mandate, and Schrödinger’s Women’s Sports: Simultaneously Existential and Irrelevant, According to Democrats
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Red Planet News, Animal’s Hump Day News, Animal’s Red Thursday News, and Goodbye, Blue Monday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm for February 28, Another Day, Another Democratic Activist Scam Artist, Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-TX) RIP, Konstantin Kisin On Zelensky’s Cock-Up, and GrannyKiller Cuomo Runs For Mayor
Behind The Black: Blue Ghost lunar surface operations proceeding as planned, Europa Clipper completes Mars fly-by, India’s space agency ISRO begins construction of second spaceport, Ariane-6 successfully launches for the second time, and Is a supermassive black hole hidden in the Large Magellanic Cloud?
Cafe Hayek: Trump Is Hopelessly Confused On Trade, Trumpian Tariff Fallacies, More On the Myth of Tariff-Induced American Industrialization, Another Open Letter to Pres. Trump, and Say What?
CDR Salamander: PLAN’s Operation Tasmanian Dragon
Chicago Boyz: A Serious Case of the “Mehs”, Libertarians vs Communitarians?…Is This Really the Primary Split? Blogiversary, Rescue 9-’49 – Or, A Heroic Exploit by the 19th Century Army Officer that Fort Rucker Wasn’t Named After, and What Does Higher Ed Stand For?
Da Tech Guy: The SOTU Speech Highlights a Great Truism About How the Cost of Trump Hatred, My Message to Canada, France, Luxembourg and Every Other Country Hitting Trump Over Ukraine After Today’s Meeting, and The 1776 Revival on the House Floor or Trump Wins Again
Dana Loesch: Italy’s Meloni Cited As Backing Ukraine NATO Protections Without Membership
Don Surber: What Trump Said
First Street Journal: Will Bunch blows his top again, A win for normality and common sense at Radnor High School, World War III Watch -Comment rescue at Patterico’s Pontifications, The Washington Post conflates current house painting fashion with race, and The New York Times and the control of language
Gates Of Vienna: USAID Funded Islamic Terrorists with Taxpayer Dollars, Ramadan: The Most Exciting Time of the Year, An Eye-Gouging Afghan Loony in Paris, A Drunk Loony, a Stolen Van, and an Allahu Akhbar Moment in Vienna, and Viktor Orbán and Alice Weidel Discuss Ukraine, Trump, and the Non-Democratic European Union
The Geller Report: President Trump Weighing Criminal Charges for USAID Staff After DOGE Uncovered Wild Abuse and Theft, “Catch and Revoke”: Rubio State Dept Deploys AI to Hunt Down and Revoke Visas of Foreign Students Who Support Hamas Terror, Trump Pauses Intelligence Sharing Operations With Ukraine, “You Were Sent by God”: Hostages Tell Trump of Captivity Horrors, “It’s a Miracle I’m Alive”, and Trump Executive Order: Those Who Challenge Administration Policies in Court Are FINANCIALLY LIABLE When They Lose
Hollywood In Toto: Rule of Jenny Pen Lets Screen Icons Shine, Queen of the Ring’s Flaws Are Its Heel Turn, Adam Carolla Crushes Anora with One Brutal Quip, Daredevil: Born Again Battles Trumpian Old Foe, and All-Star Cast Brings King of Kings to Life
The Lid: Chicago Democrat Wants Law to Allow Suspects to Assault Cops, Now THIS is Hilarious: Trump Just Set Federal Employee Credit Card Limits to $1, and Now He Admits it: NBC’s Chuck Todd Suddenly Says Biden is a Big Fat Liar
Legal Insurrection: Trump Meets Freed Israeli Hostages, Gives ‘Last Warning’ to Hamas, The New York Times Mocks RFK Jr for Vitamin A Guidance to Combat Texas Measles Outbreak, Masked Anti-Israel Protesters Take Over Barnard College Library, NYPD Makes Arrests, Tesla Owners Continue to be Targeted in Western U.S., and Ten House Democrats Vote with GOP to Censure Rep. Al Green
Nebraska Energy Observer: I think of, Not-a-SOTU; Onward and Upward, The Sound of Monday, and What happens next?
Outkick: Dan Lanning Receives Massive Pay Increase From Oregon With New Contract, Shohei Ohtani’s Pitching Return Could Take Longer Than Expected, Stephen A. Smith’s New $100 Million Contract With ESPN Is First, Last of Its Kind, NHL Trade Deadline Could Get Wild As Bruins Reportedly Are Open To Trading Brad Marchand, and Country’s Kacey Musgraves Wallops America With Vulgar Instagram Content, Weather Channel Boobs & Dancin’ Dems!
Power Line: Are Democrats Learning a Lesson? A blast from the past, The great Al Green, Feeding Our Fraud: “I know how to make money”, and Thoughts from the ammo line
Shark Tank: The “Beginning of the End” For Property Taxes In Florida?
Shot In The Dark: Who Has Two Thumbs, 21, All Those Thems & Theys, An Escalator With No Top, and The DFL – On Relentless Patrol!
The Political Hat: Quick Takes – Nature Rights: Forest Rights At The WEF; Nature vs. Lithium; Ecological Constitutional Rejection, The War On Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers, The Memeification Of The GOP, The Executive, Unitary Or Otherwise, and Firing Line Friday: Tom Wolfe and The Painted Word
This Ain’t Hell: DOD Extremist Witch Hunt Halted, Confused? You Should Be, President Trump temporarily suspends military aid to Ukraine, WWII pilot to be laid to rest, and DOD Civilians Too!
Transterrestrial Musings: The Depth Of The Corruption, Lawsuit Update, The Democrats’ Dominance, and Collapse, About To Launch, and Tardigrades To The Rescue?
Victory Girls: Democrats Say ‘This Is Not Normal’—Irony Dies on Live TV, Trump To Democrats: You’re Just Never Going To Be Happy, and Bill Kristol Publicly Embraces His Inner Evil Clown
Watts Up With That: False Pretense of Energy Transition: Long on Facts, Short on Truth, Wrong, PBS – Real World Data Doesn’t Show That a Climate Crisis Is Happening, The Climate United Fund Outrage, and ‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past’
The Federalist: Leftist Wisconsin AG Just Can’t Quit His Phony ‘Fake Electors’ Witch Hunt, The New York Times Compares Trump’s Presidency To The Chinese Cultural Revolution – Survivors Disagree, If The Supreme Court Is Going To Ignore The Constitution, Trump Should Ignore The Supreme Court, CNN Forced To Fact-Check Itself After Claiming Trump Lied About Transgender Mice, and Democrats’ Biggest Problem Right Now Is That They Are Out Of Touch And Uncool
Mark Steyn: Tipples or Tariffs, Mann Ordered to Pay More than Those He Sought to Destroy, Live Around the Planet: Not Clapping But Drowning, Moon Over Mayfair, and All We Are Saying Is Give War a Chance!

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Category: Linkagery

Why Has the ‘Valuable Resource’ Known as 538 Been Summarily Discarded?

Posted on | March 6, 2025 | Comments Off on Why Has the ‘Valuable Resource’ Known as 538 Been Summarily Discarded?

Nate Silver (left); G. Elliott Morris (right)

While I await the arrival of Sidney Blumenthal’s book The Permanent Campaign — ordered from Amazon yesterday, because I need to reference it for a future American Spectator column — permit me to climb aboard the bandwagon of those celebrating this happy news:

Disney axed Nate Silver’s once-influential FiveThirtyEight on Wednesday as part of sweeping job cuts at ABC News, ending the data-driven political site’s seven-year run at the network.
FiveThirtyEight gained national prominence for its statistical approach to political forecasting but drew criticism for misses in key elections, most notably giving Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning the 2016 presidential election.
FiveThirtyEight’s editorial director of data analytics, G. Elliott Morris, confirmed the layoffs on Bluesky on Wednesday, writing, “As reported, the entire staff of 538 was laid off this morning. This is a severe blow to political data journalism, and I feel for my colleagues.” . . .
Silver, who founded the site in 2008 and left ABC in May 2023, wrote on X, “Oh geez, I just saw the news about 538. My heart goes out to the people there. They were tremendously hard-working and produced a lot of extremely valuable data and insight for everyone who wants to understand politics better. They deserved much better.”
Silver left ABC amid reports of tension with network executives over resource allocation and editorial direction. . . .
FiveThirtyEight began as an independent polling aggregation platform before being licensed to The New York Times, then acquired by ESPN in 2013, and later transferred to ABC News.
Despite shuttering the project, ABC News said it would “continue to provide the best-in-class polling and political data analysis that it has offered for decades.”

Well, there’s a lot to work through here and I suppose the best place to begin is with ABC News claiming to offer “best-in-class polling,” to which my reply can be summarized briefly: LOL, are you kidding me?

In August, after Kamala Harris had replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate, ABC News and the Washington Post sponsored a poll by Ipsos that had Harris leading Trump by 4 points, 49% to 45%, among registered voters. Two weeks later, ABC News alone sponsored the Ipsos poll, which again had Harris leading by 4 points, 50% to Trump’s 46%. Then in mid-September, the ABC/Ipso poll reported: “This poll finds the race at 51-46 percent, Harris-Trump, among all adults; 51-47 percent among registered voters; and 52-46 percent among likely voters.”

Harris SIX POINTS AHEAD among likely voters!

This was the last 2024 poll published under the aegis of ABC News, and when the votes were all counted in November — including the suspiciously long count in California — Trump won by a margin of 1.5%, meaning that ABC News was off by more than 7 points in the wrong direction. So much for ABC News and their “best-in-class polling.”

As for Nate Silver and the history of FiveThirtyEight, it began as a pseudonymous blog on Daily Kos in 2007. Silver’s background was doing economic analysis in the business world and, with great success, doing statistical analysis of baseball. Silver has never been a pollster — that is to say, he has no experience in “field work” — and the methods by which he deduces electoral probability from public polling data are rather opaque. Nevertheless, his prediction for the 2008 election was so spot-on that it made him an overnight celebrity in the world of politics, and landed him a book contract reportedly worth $700,000 in advance.

In 2010, FiveThirtyEight began publishing under the New York Times masthead. This arrangement continued for about three years, until mid-2013, when ESPN announced it had bought the FiveThirtyEight franchise and that “Silver will serve as editor-in-chief of the site and will build a team of journalists, editors, analysts and contributors.” ESPN is a sports network, and made mention of Silver’s baseball analysis skills in their announcement. They also mentioned that Silver would be appearing on their sister network, ABC News (both being properties of Disney). In 2018, FiveThirtyEight was transferred to the ABC News division, and five years later, Silver left ABC News, with FiveThirtyEight then being taken over by G. Elliott Morris, who had become “the new hotness” because of his predictions about the 2018 midterm elections.

So, in the 2024 cycle, Silver was doing his election probability thing on his own Substack blog, while Morris was running FiveThirtyEight for ABC News, and did either one of them predict a Trump victory?

NO, MA’AM, THEY DID NOT.

The fact that Trump not only won the Electoral College (as he had done in 2016) but also won the nationwide popular vote by a margin of 2.3 million votes — which he had not done in 2016 — means that predicting a Trump win in 2024 should have been easier than eight years earlier. Yet somehow these two statistical wizards managed to miss this one.

The reason I call attention to this glaring failure of both FiveThirtyEight (under ABC News and G. Elliott Morris) and the site’s founder Nate Silver, is because in noting the demise of FiveThirtyEight, Professor Glenn Reynolds links to Nate’s blog post bemoaning the sad fate of his brainchild and — oh, boy! — let me remind you that denial is not the name of a river in Egypt. Silver declares that “the media just lost an extremely valuable resource,” raising the obvious question, “Valuable to whom?” If FiveThirtyEight’s stock-in-trade was predicting election outcomes, how are they so “valuable” when they got it wrong in 2024?

Perhaps a better metric of FiveThirtyEight’s value would be the fact that ABC News didn’t sell the site — for which their parent company paid a pretty penny, years ago — but rather shut it down. Had there been any market value to the site, why weren’t there any other media operations offering cash to acquire it from ABC News? The obvious answer is that FiveThirtyEight was always a money-losing operation, first for the New York Times, and then under Disney ownership, first at ESPN and then at ABC News. The salaries of the staff always exceeded whatever revenue was generated by FiveThirtyEight. Nate Silver goes on to say that there is a “bright future” for the kind of “data journalism” that FiveThirtyEight did, by which I suppose he means that there’s always a market for predicting elections wrong, so long as your error favors Democrats.

Let me be the first to say, "Learn to Code."@gelliottmorris @FiveThirtyEight pic.twitter.com/3SpOZQMhNO

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) March 5, 2025