Harrison Smith at InfoWars reminds us that BuzzFeed, which recently announced it would lay off “15 percent of its staff (with pink slips to go to up to 400 people, according to one insider),” has received nearly half a billion dollars of venture-capital investment since launching in 2006. In April 2013, it was reported that BuzzFeed’s investment was $46 million, which means they’ve attracted about $450 million in new capital over the past six years — despite having never shown a profit!
BuzzFeed has been burning through cash at a rate of $75 million a year and you might think that at some point their investors would become impatient waiting for this operation to show some prospect of making a return on their investment. But it’s the same kind of digital Ponzi scheme where Arianna Huffington spent years losing money with HuffPo before selling it to AOL, which sold out to Yahoo, that got bought up by Verizon. As long as there is a possibility that BuzzFeed could be sold to a giant conglomerate — Viacom or Disney or whatever — the company’s value is whatever it might fetch in such a sale, and if BuzzFeed could be sold for a price above the roughly $500 million in capital that’s been pumped into it over the years, then that investment would not be lost. However, “if” is the crucial word here, and “if” becomes a question: “When?”
Even after laying off 400 people, there seems to be little prospect that BuzzFeed can ever reach profitability as a stand-alone, and where are they going to find a sucker to buy such a money-dump? Recall that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr in 2013, but within three years, was forced to admit Tumblr was worthless. Then Yahoo was sold to Verizon for $4.5 billion, with Mayer getting a $23 million “golden parachute” to resign. Suckers like Mayer are starting to become harder to find, however, as investors are less easily deceived by Internet boondoggles than they were just a few years ago. Sooner or later, the millennial clickbait bubble will collapse, and if BuzzFeed doesn’t sell out soon, they may have trouble finding a buyer.
Failed Democrat Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will deliver the official Democrat response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on February 5.
Speaking before reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) revealed Abrams agreed to deliver the speech when the pair spoke by phone three weeks prior. “She has led the charge for voting rights, which is at the root of just about everything else,” he said of the Georgia Democrat.
In a statement shared to Twitter, Abrams said of her planned speech: “At a moment when our nation needs to hear from leaders who can unite for a common purpose, I am honored to be delivering the Democratic State of the Union response.” . . .
Abrams was defeated by her Republican rival Brian Kemp with 48.8 percent of the vote in what was among the most hotly contested races in the 2018 midterm election. Abrams, who served as the Democrat leader of Georgia’s state General Assembly, is reportedly mulling a run for U.S. Senate in 2020, and has met with top Democrats, including Schumer, about a possible bid.
If she could not win statewide in 2018, when the Democrats’ anti-Trump rage had been boiling for two years, why would anyone believe Abrams could win in 2020? Even if she’s the best hope the Georgia Democrats have got, however, why does it make sense to have her give the national party’s response to Trump’s SOTU speech? What Democrats need to be doing in the run-up to 2020 — the normal logic of politics — is restoring their relationship with blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin who they lost in 2016. Instead, they seem to be doubling-down with their left-wing base. Does this make sense? Is this something they’re doing on advice of their consultants? Or are Democrats living inside a hermetically sealed bubble, an echo chamber within which the voices of common sense can never be heard? We shall see . . .
A Florida man is accused of fatally shooting his parents and brother after stealing $200,000 from them to pay a Bulgarian webcam model he met as a result of his addiction to online porn, police say. Grant Amato, a 29-year-old nurse, killed his family members at their home in Chuluota on January 25, according to the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office.
Amato was charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of his mother, Margaret Amato, 61; father, Chad Amato, 59; and brother, Cody Amato, 31, the sheriff’s office said. Amato’s surviving brother and Cody’s girlfriend told detectives Grant Amato had stolen the money so he could keep talking to the Bulgarian woman online and that resulted in a deteriorating relationship with his family. Cody’s girlfriend told police Cody told her he feared “Grant Amato would kill everyone,” according to court documents. . . .
The Seminole County Sheriff’s Office began investigating the triple homicide in rural Chuluota, Florida, on January 25, after a co-worker called police to express concern that Cody Amato hadn’t come to work. When deputies entered the Amatos home on Sultan Circle about 9 a.m., they found three people dead inside. They were later identified as Margaret Amato, Chad Amato and Cody Amato, according to the sheriff’s office. . . .
Cody Amato’s girlfriend told investigators that over the past few months there had been “problems” with Grant Amato. She said Grant stole $60,000 from Cody and also stole his guns and sold them without his permission. She told police that Grant Amato had been placed in a facility because he was unstable and her boyfriend told her he was afraid that “Grant Amato would kill everyone,” according to court documents. Police said the admission to the facility in South Florida was voluntary.
Cody’s girlfriend also told police that Grant [Amato] was unemployed and had been “going downhill” after he was “kicked out of nurse anesthetist school.” She also told police that Amato was “having a relationship” with a woman from Bulgaria “and that he was stealing money from the family so he could contact the female.”
Investigators said, “It was later learned that Grant Amato had stolen approximately $200,000 from the family to purchase time to interact with the female on a pornographic website.” . . .
Grant Amato had been talking to an “online call girl” in Bulgaria and had been wiring “an excessive amount of money to her and wasn’t sure if he owed money to her,” according to court documents. Jason Amato said the woman had sent mail to Grant and given her his parents’ address.
Jason Amato told police that his brother had sent the Bulgarian woman more than $200,000 in a three-month period. But he said he had spoken to his mother on January 16 and she said everything was OK and Grant was applying for work. Jason Amato also told detectives he was aware that his brother had stolen $150,000 from his parents, including a $65,000 loan on the house, and had taken $50,000 from Chad Amato. . . .
Jason Amato told police that his brother spent about two weeks at a facility for depression. Police said Grant Amato was actually enrolled in a 60-day program to treat internet- and sex-addiction. But he only completed about two weeks before returning home, according to court documents. He returned home on January 5.
Grant Amato told investigators that on January 24 he was in a heated argument with his father and was kicked out of his home because he was continuing to communicate with the Bulgarian webcam model over the internet. Amato told police he met the girl on Cam Girls, an adult web camera website, and had been communicating with her since June 2018, while sending her $200,000. . . .
According to court documents, Amato told police his father gave him an “ultimatum” because of his addiction. His father told him if he wanted to stay at his family’s house he would have to complete the sex addiction program at Cornerstone in Fort Lauderdale. He went into the program on December 22, but left early on January 4. He returned to the Orlando area and his family held a meeting where he was given a two-page list of rules he had to follow to stay in the house, according to court documents.
“During the meeting, Chad told Grant that if he broke any of the rules he would have to leave the house immediately. One of the rules was that he wasn’t allowed to have communications with the female in Bulgaria,” police wrote in the affidavit. “Grant Amato initially agreed to the rules his father had set, but he didn’t think they were fair because he felt that the Bulgarian female was his girlfriend and they had a relationship.”
Wow. Where to begin? Let’s start with this: If you were going to steal $200,000 for a whore, why wouldn’t you find a local whore, instead of some whore in Bulgaria you met via the Internet? Like, I don’t know the going rate for whores in Seminole County, Florida, but I’m pretty sure $200,000 would buy a lot of time with whores. Just sayin’ . . .
This shows how easily people can get lost in Internet-generated illusions. Grant Amato “felt that the Bulgarian female was his girlfriend and they had a relationship” — and, in a similar way, teenagers afflicted with “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” become convinced they’re transgender after binge-watching YouTube “transition” videos. There have always been people with weird fantasies, but the Internet makes it possible for such people to spend endless hours playing make-believe until the fantasy takes on a life of its own. So this guy in Florida thinks he’s in a “relationship” with a Bulgarian camwhore and kills his parents and his brother to facilitate that fantasy. Crazy People Are Dangerous.
Frankenfurter, it’s all over. Your mission is a failure. Your lifestyle’s too extreme . . .
The woman spoke with a Russian accent, and she wanted someone to listen. We were in the lobby of the Heritage Foundation after Monday’s event “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns from the Left,” where the ideology of “gender identity” had been critically examined by a panel that included two board members of the radical Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF). The woman’s daughter, now 29, had begun identifying as transgender in 2013, after working on President Obama’s re-election campaign. “She cut us all off!” the woman said, explaining that her daughter — her only child — had blocked any communication with her family via Facebook, telephone or email. “It’s a cult!”
I already had all I needed for my article, but the woman — her name is Tatiana and she immigrated with her family from Russia in 1993 — wanted to talk, so I took notes. “The whole involvement started with politics,” she said, recalling how proud she had been when her daughter started working on the presidential campaign. Then the daughter had broken up with her longtime boyfriend, and the descent into transgenderism began. “I experienced the death of my own child,” she said, speaking metaphorically, as the daughter she raised has in effect ceased to exist and is completely alienated from her family. “It’s mourning . . . People can’t understand.”
Monday was a weird day all around. I’d driven down to D.C. for this panel, my first road-trip expedition in months, 150 miles round-trip, and in the elevator up to the Heritage Foundation’s 7th floor Douglas and Sarah Allison Auditorium, I remarked to a couple of young staffers how weird it was that radical feminists were speaking there. “We’re through the looking-glass, down the rabbit hole, sailing uncharted waters in the part of the map where it says ‘Here Be Dragons’.” I’d arrived with about 10 minutes to spare, and sat in the second row, getting ready for the event. Then I looked up from my notebook and saw a group of women about to sit right in front of me. One of them looked familiar.
“Excuse me, ma’am — are you Lierre Keith?” I asked.
Indeed, it was her. It boggled my mind that this radical environmentalist from Deep Green Resistance was at the Heritage Foundation, but we’re living in strange times, in which lesbians are being driven out of gay organizations because they won’t toe the “inclusive” party line:
Julia Beck’s voice quavered with emotion and she seemed on the brink of tears as she neared the end of her presentation Monday. “We are losing an entire generation of sisters to this madness,” she said. “That’s why it’s personal. It’s infuriating. It’s devastating. And I have had enough.”
A radical lesbian feminist, Ms. Beck spoke these words at a place she once never imagined she’d be — a seventh-floor auditorium at the conservative Heritage Foundation — as part of a panel discussing “this madness” of transgender ideology. But as Heritage scholar Ryan T. Anderson said in introducing Monday’s event, no liberal institution in Washington was willing to host such a discussion because the influential and well-funded transgender lobby has effectively silenced criticism on the Left. Ms. Beck began her presentation by telling how she was removed from the Baltimore mayor’s LGBTQ commission because she refused to kowtow to transgender ideologues.
“You might be thinking to yourself, ‘Why is a lesbian speaking at the Heritage Foundation?’ And I ask myself the same thing,” she said. “But my answer is pretty simple: There is no place for me. I am politically homeless.” Ms. Beck was the target of what she called a “month-long witch-hunt” after she committed the “crime” of referring to a rapist as male. This involved the notorious British case of Stephen Wood (a/k/a “Karen White”), a sex offender who assaulted two women in a women’s prison to which he had been assigned after he decided to “identify” as female. As crazy as that sounds, it actually reflects the current state of law in England, and the fact that a lesbian feminist got kicked off a municipal commission in Baltimore for stating an indisputable fact — i.e., the rapist is a man, no matter how he may “identify” — shows how transgender ideology is a threat to basic First Amendment freedoms. . . .
Regardless of her politics, I don’t think Miss Pipko is going to have much problem finding modeling work. Abbreviated Rule 5 post this week for a number of reasons; back to the usual next Sunday.
Mistaken identity is always a risk when a witch-hunt hysteria takes hold, and the hunt for “hate” in the Trump era has produced a mob mentality that rivals 17th-century Salem. Just ask Michelle Grissom, a Colorado middle-school teacher who may lose her job because she mistakenly identified the wrong Covington Catholic School student in a viral video — and called him a “Hitler Youth”!
Ms. Grissom has been placed on leave from her position as a social studies teacher at Mountain Ridge Middle School in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch after deleting her Twitter account and apologizing for her error. The Kentucky student she meant to defame as a Nazi — Nick Sandmann — is now arguably the most famous Catholic in America, thanks to video of his Jan. 18 confrontation with activist Nathan Phillips in D.C., but Ms. Grissom instead “doxed” Covington Catholic junior Jay Jackson. Unfortunately for her, Jackson did not accompany his classmates on the trip to Washington for the annual March for Life. Instead, he was 500 miles from the nation’s capital, playing basketball in a tournament in Middletown, Ohio. Adding to Ms. Grissom’s misfortunes was the fact that Jay’s father is a successful obstetrician who, to say the least, did not take kindly to having his son labeled a Hitler Youth. After the gravity of her error became apparent, Ms. Grissom issued an abject apology and also resigned her post as local teachers union official.
To paraphrase Britney Spears: Oops, they did it again. . . .
