Israeli Assets in the Mainstream Press

A controversial subject, to be sure

News broke today that Buzzfeed News is shutting down. Good riddance, its business model relied on feeding young people junk food, and their reporting was manipulative and full of lies. In the higher interest-rate environment we’re heading into, a lot of this garbage from the last two decades is starting to get washed out, and I think that’s just wonderful.

The real issue is that their founding editor, Ben Smith, is an Israeli asset and the son of a neocon judge in New York. Today, Smith runs Semafor, which focuses on Africa in a way more media ought to pay attention to. However, because Smith is an Israeli asset, they don’t cover what’s really going on there, like the stuff with Dan Gertler and Beny Steinmetz, or the conflict on the border of Rwanda and the DRC.

Here’s a video from Semafor from a few days ago in which Smith is interviewing Barry Diller, the proprietor of the Chinese-Israeli Daily Beast who has been covered here previously. What you have to understand about this is that a lot of journalists are actually paid quite handsomely not to ask questions instead of to ask questions.

Before we go on, I want to address the big picture here.

I said in the previous post that the ADL is a front for organized crime and foreign intelligence. That’s a big claim. You wonder, didn’t we defeat the mob? Not exactly.

This isn't really an ideological question. It’s not about Zionism, and it’s certainly not about Jews—if I were Jewish, I’d be a Zionist. People who try to make it about either of these things are not helping. It’s not about a Jewish propensity to criminality or something. When this is over, I would be happy to go on whatever platform and tamp down anti-Semitism, but some things have to be dealt with first.

When you look at Zionist politics in the U.S., you see a lot of money from the gaming industry and financial fraud—Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried, Michael Milken, Sheldon Adelson, these sorts of people. So there’s a lot of criminal or semi-criminal money floating around Zionist politics, a lot of which makes its way into the Republican Party. When you combine this with evangelical Christians who have a religious commitment to giving Israel whatever they ask for, this is an environment that lends itself to lots of problems. There are mobsters who will take advantage of it.

In the past, a lot of this criminality was overlooked—I think it was, to a large extent, allowed to happen. The thing to look at is money laundering networks in the Caribbean. The story of Sterling National Bank, a mob bank connected to the ADL, is an interesting one. There are a lot of players in this area, Jewish organized crime is just one of them. In the past this network actually had parapolitical uses for the U.S. state.

When Bibi returned to power this latest time, a lot of people realized how powerful that mobster network had become—it has become not an asset, but a liability to both the U.S. and Israel, especially when combined with this powerful spyware. And so the taboo, in both the mainstream and conservative press, about talking about this stuff, is harmful at this point to both states. A lot of the reporters who benefitted from that old way of doing things are starting to have a hard time.

When it comes to journalism, the basic problem is just operant conditioning: reporters know, if you go there, your career will suffer. The problem is in the long-run this messes with the public’s ability to make sense of these things.

With that in mind, let’s move on to some specific cases. We’ll start with Blake Hounshell, a reporter beloved in the DC press corps who jumped off a bridge in February. In the past he’s done Bloggingheads with Michael Goldfarb, who hired Fusion GPS to do research that helped corrupt the FBI. He’s got a 2012 byline on this really weird alternative-reality story in the Post, headlined “What if Israel bombed Iran? The view from Washington.”

You see among right-wing Zionists in Washington the assumption that Bibi will find ways to force the United States’ hand on Iran issues, and Hounshell’s piece there is sort of gaming out how that would take place. You can see another recent example of this in Lee Smith’s Tablet piece about events in Israel, “If America wants to set fires in his backyard, Bibi can set fires, too.”

There’s a real hint of menace in these suggestions. I don’t think it’s appropriate for the United States to be menaced like this.

One more incident with Hounshell is worth discussing. My late friend Betsy Rothstein reported on how he dragged a young reporter into a supply closet at Politico and fired her:

But I’ve truly never heard of an editor dressing down an employee in a supply closet, which is what happened at Politico this week when Digital Editorial Director Blake Hounshell decided to do just that. Hounshell, who quickly rose up within the ranks as one of editor Susan Glasser’s top managers, on Monday took a junior breaking news reporter, Kendall Breitman, into a supply closet to tell her that she had to pack up her stuff and leave, The Mirror has learned.

Ms. Breitman now lives in Tel Aviv. What was this really about?

One thing I look closely at when it comes to these issues is who gets cancelled, and who gets rehabilitated—and what the real reasons are for both. When I read, for instance, Compact founder Matthew Schmitz’s exoneration of Harvey Weinstein—comparing his situation to Jud Süß—I sort of wonder whose ass he’s kissing. I don’t really think it’s about the women—though some of them were obviously mistreated—it’s about corruption and money laundering in the movie business. The Compact guys have been given an opportunity to be helpful, I’m not sure why they haven’t taken it.

Let’s move on to Jamie Kirchick. Several months ago he took to Graydon Carter’s publication to rehabilitate Armie Hammer following allegations of sadistic sexual practices and cannibalistic fetishism. Graydon Carter is, of course, the Canadian editor who killed the original Jeffrey Epstein exposé.

Hammer’s great-grandfather and namesake was a spy who corrupted the Nixon administration—in fact, this might have had something to do with why the deep state decided to take Nixon down.

In the past, a piece like Kirchick’s might have allowed Hammer to restore his reputation. Today, the Los Angeles District Attorney is looking into him. Sorry, Jamie.

Frankly it’s hard to imagine a story more likely to bring America together than locking up Armie Hammer: the conservatives could delight in watching Hollyweird get taken down a peg, and feminists could enjoy justice coming to a sexual abuser. A feel-good story for the whole country.

Another thing I look at is this exchange regarding former congressman Aaron Schock, between Kirchick and former Media Matters LGBT issues chief Luke Brinker. Let’s look at Brinker’s piece in Salon:

You may also know the name because Schock, first elected to Congress in 2008, has been dogged by whispers of homosexuality virtually from the moment he arrived in Washington.

There was that teal belt, the dapper clothes, and that video of Schock strolling through Tampa's gayborhood during the GOP convention in 2012, telling reporters that then-vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan should wear outfits that better exhibited his chiseled physique. There was also, of course, an abortive attempt to out the congressman, sparked by a cryptic Facebook post from journalist Itay Hod. …

At any rate, schadenfreude took hold throughout much of Dupont Circle when Schock announced on Tuesday that he would resign amid mounting evidence of financial and ethical improprieties. He didn't go down quite the way many expected him to, but the rising star had fallen just the same. The journalist Jamie Kirchick trains a critical eye on this gleeful reaction in a new piece for The Daily Beast, lambasting "the bitchy gay community" for what he depicts as a sexual McCarthyism akin to that of our most vile, bigoted enemies.

Everyone involved in this situation is highly Israeli. Kirchick is a neocon, Itay Hod is a former IDF paratrooper, and Luke Brinker lives in Tel Aviv today: you’ve got the initial threat (Hod), the show of mercy (Kirchick), and the imposition of new rules (Brinker). You can sort of see the shape of Israeli tradecraft here, involving sexual coercion. They get awfully bold about this stuff because nobody ever calls them out on it. This is something they need to not do. It has implications for not just politics, but religion as well.

One last case, I want to talk about poor National Review editor Jack Butler’s star turn in the Chinese casino magnate Barry Diller’s Daily Beast. They let him write a piece about the Bronze Age Pervert, which really serves as more of an advertisement. For these sorts of things, you’re allowed to disagree all you want, but you aren’t allowed to notice the networks and funding behind the players.

Butler positions himself between the Randians and the BAPists, praising the criticisms of C. Bradley Thompson, a Clemson professor who writes terrible books. Thompson is affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute, the high-church wing of Objectivist thought. These people are deeply strange.

But, fundamentally, I look at the Randians, and then I look at the BAPists, and I see two camps that are very Israeli. Ayn Rand herself was a glass-the-Palestinians person, who thought the West Bank should be liquidated because Jews are just better people. Thompson co-authored a book with Yaron Brook, another ARI person with a background in Israeli military intelligence. BAP is a protege of the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs. If you’re not able to note this, it’s almost like arguing with a bot network or something. Not my circus, not my monkeys.