The Case for Bill Ackman Crushing the German Press in America

It's Pershing Square versus Axel Springer

Bill Ackman has Claudine Gay’s scalp around his neck now. His beautiful wife, Neri Oxman, like many Israelis, is a woman of remarkable loyalty, a quality she instilled in her students with her thank-you gifts to Jeffrey Epstein. And she’s so great with science, which you can see in her interview with Lex Fridman, a “researcher” on Elon’s Chinese assassination machines Tesla autopilot.

Ackman’s dander is up over Insider revealing the plagiarism by his wife—many of these assets plagiarize all the time because they’re constantly being fed talking points—and so he’s going after MIT and Axel Springer. The plagiarism conversation is going to be uncomfortable for all concerned. But this is very funny. It’s a fight Axel Springer is going to have a hard time winning.

Axel Springer is a specific kind of German media company. Its origin story has a lot of gaps in it that kind of don’t make sense. One might describe them as sort of libertarian Germans, but very strongly Zionist, and Axel Springer famously has a speech code when it comes to criticism of Israel. They’ve fired journalists in the past for questioning it, and that’s been brought here through their ownership of Politico and Insider. One Insider journalist last year tried to get me to remove evidence of public corruption from the Senate Judiciary Committee connected to Israel.

If Axel Springer pushes back too hard against Ackman, German regulators might even have something to say, and one must assume various camps of Israel’s supporters in America are going to be watching, too.

I’m against these speech codes, and fairly skeptical of foreign ownership of American media in general. If I were European I would certainly be more supportive of Israel in this moment. If I were French, with a large and restive Muslim population, or Germany with the historical baggage, it might make sense to stay out of all this. But I’m not.

As I’ve laid out in great detail on this blog, we don’t want anti-Semitism to get out of hand, but it is very necessary for the U.S. to rein Israel in, and enforce the law. One of the big problems is that the press and the opposition party at the moment are not pressuring the Biden administration for its weakness toward the Netanyahu government. That’s the incentive structure that needs to change. So that probably means Ackman wrecking Axel Springer is good.

Semafor, the publication edited by Israeli asset Ben Smith, which the Koch machine betrayed its stated foreign policy commitments to back, has a scoop that Axel Springer’s top leadership is already fighting about the Oxman plagiarism scoop:

Semafor has learned that the report has caused serious divisions within the top echelons of Axel Springer, BI’s German owner. Some company leaders have debated whether Ackman’s wife was fair game for reporting, and have been concerned that the report could be construed as antisemitic and anti-Zionist. (Oxman was born and raised in Israel.)

In a statement to Semafor, Axel Springer spokesperson Adib Sisani said that while the facts of BI’s report have not been disputed, over the past few days “questions have been raised about the motivation and the process leading up to the reporting — questions that we take very seriously. Our media brands operate independently, however all Axel Springer publications are committed to journalism that meets rigorous editorial standards and processes.”

I struggle to come up with a legitimate reason why Oxman would be off-limits here, she’s a notable figure in her own right, doing public interviews.

But most of all this is a very interesting pickle for Axel Springer, a lot of taboos on both sides of the pond are being tested here.