What’s Going On in Missouri?

Compared to the stalwart and virtuous plainsmen of Kansas, Missouri is a somewhat troubled state. They have a huge mob problem. At one point, contemplating a career as a cigarette smuggler, I calculated that the St. Louis-Chicago route is nearly as lucrative as North Carolina-NYC—the most lucrative in the country, and easier to get away with because North Carolina applies no tax stamps—the latter being too saturated by literal terrorism finance and rather more nasty organized crime. I’m not so arrogant as to think I’m the first one to notice that.

But between the Bud Light boycott, the nuclear waste scandal, and Pope Francis cracking down on Cardinal Burke, it’s been a rough year for St. Louis.

Sarah Unsicker, running to be attorney general of Missouri, is taking her place as the anti-mob Democrat in the race. Will Scharf is the Leonard Leo candidate, and Elad Gross, whose wife worked for the ADL, is sort of the candidate of establishment liberal Judaism.

Charles and Eric Garland met with Unsicker, and the local media freaked out about it last week, and Unsicker was removed from her committees in the state legislature.

Let me explain what’s going on. The media is being tested to see who can cover these issues with the kind of moderation and seriousness that the moment calls for, whether they will mention, for instance, that is now public knowledge Charles is, whatever he’s said in the past, a donor to Yad Vashem and a federal informant. The fact is most of them can’t. I would have loved to, for instance, leave the Buma material in the hands of the Post, but after long experience, I have no confidence at all they’ll be honest about the Israeli angles to all this stuff. At this point we have a fairly good picture of who the responsible reporters are and aren’t.

It has been a pretty common track, certainly over the Trump years, to take up the anti-extremism beat, but most of the people who take this route aren’t very good at it, they don’t know the history, and they hide things. At a certain point this stuff is going to get played out, we’ll see how Tina Nguyen’s forthcoming bodice-ripper does on the shelves.

Harvard Stands Up to Bill Ackman

One must give credit to the unchartered Massachusetts university, they stood up to Bill Ackman and are keeping President Claudine Gay. Gay had the support of the students, faculty and the endowment, so she wins. It strikes me as a rather dishonest misdirection to be focused entirely on college students’ hypothetical support for genocide rather than the actual ethnic cleansing happening right now in Gaza. I’m not trying to be moralistic about this, nature is red in tooth and claw, but don’t ask me to look away, lend my support, or lie about it.

Elise Stefanik, who led the charge from the Republican side of Congress against Gay, turns out to have plagiarized her own letter. Harvard appears to have hired—guess who—Clare Locke to threaten people writing about Gay’s plagiarism.

Ackman is another cheap-money celebrity businessman, who’s married to an Israeli citizen and recipient of Jeffrey Epstein’s funds. A number of his investments are somewhat suspect from the perspective of some of the issues discussed on this blog.

He’s complaining on Twitter, in a long-winded tirade, that the Harvard endowment sold a stock he donated before it realized what he expected it to. The stock in question was the Korean e-commerce platform Coupang, which was heavily backed by SoftBank. It’s hard to blame the endowment managers for not wanting to be associated with that. Then there’s the whole Valeant saga, which was forced to pay a huge fine by the SEC.

Praxis Society Gets the NYT Treatment

Joe Bernstein, formerly of Buzzfeed, has a big piece about the Praxis Society, the Fyre Festival of micronations I wrote about here in February. It’s backed by Sam Altman’s venture firm and its first employee used to work at the Israel Innovation Authority, so that tells you pretty much all you need to know.

Ben Badejo Informed on Gettr to the FBI

Benjamin Badejo is a black Harvard alum who joined the calls for Claudine Gay’s resignation. He was the former director of trust and safety for Gettr, the Chinese Twitter clone. Trust and safety is the most annoying Silicon Valley euphemism, it would be better for everyone if companies were simply honest and referred to them as the departments of censorship.

I called him out last week, and he replied, then quickly blocked me, but not before I saved a screenshot of him admitting he reported the company to the FBI.

Badejo, in 2022, was at a wedding in Israel with the head of algorithm development for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Noam Miron:

So you have a guy with a close relationship with the Israeli defense ministry in charge of Gettr’s censorship department. You get it yet? The question is whether similar relationships exist in the trust and safety departments of more significant platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and whether that censorship is done on Israel’s behalf. There’s actually quite a lot of evidence for that.

The lines here between business and espionage are not clear, and Israel benefits from the assumption that none of the laws regulating this stuff will ever be applied to them. James Bamford’s reporting on the Israel Cyber Shield operation strongly suggests that it’s illegal, enlisting hundreds of American Jews in an operation directed from Israel, giving them tasking “missions” from an app, to oppose the BDS movement. This, in theory, should be covered by FARA. What’s more Adam Milstein, a convicted felon, seems to have been deeply involved.

Kishida Moves to Purge the Abeists

There’s a big fundraising scandal at the top of the LDP in Japan at the moment, with PM Fumio Kishida announcing a purge of his cabinet:

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Wednesday announced plans to replace some of his Cabinet ministers to address public criticism and distrust over his governing party’s widening slush funds scandal that has shaken his grip on power.

The scandal mostly involves the Liberal Democratic Party’s largest and most powerful faction formerly led by assassinated ex-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Its key members, including those in top Cabinet and party posts, were suspected of systematically failing to report several hundred million yen (several million dollars) in funds in possible violation of campaign and election laws, media reports say. The money is alleged to have gone into unmonitored slush funds.

The scandal and a purge of Abe’s faction, which was key to Kishida’s own future, could stir a power struggle within the party ahead of a key leadership vote in September, even though Kishida doesn’t have to call a parliamentary election nearly two more years.

The grip on power by the LDP, which has almost continually ruled postwar Japan, is seen unchanged as long as the opposition remains fractured.

For more, read Tobias Harris, though it’s worth noting that Chief Cabinet Secretary Matsuno Hirokazu survived a no-confidence vote yesterday. It’s too soon to tell how this is going to shake out, but Japan’s politics have been getting more interesting.

Again, given the reconfiguration of global alliances and capital flows, and rising interest rates, you should stop listening to these putative Silicon Valley oracles who are often just mobsters, and right-of-center politics is going to look very different in the coming years. The alliance of Zionism, evangelicals and oil interests is undercut by environmentalism, rendering obsolete the Bush-era coalition. SoftBank is a vehicle for gulf-state and Asian underworld cash. The Arabs are justifiably upset by what’s going on in Gaza, Japan is shaking up, everyone’s upset about Israeli mobbish behavior. All of that old way of doing things is going down, and it’s not going down easy.

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