Exposing Epstein’s allies

The Director of the MIT Media Lab and NYT board member resigns:

Dozens of rich and influential men surrounded Jeffrey Epstein. They knew that what they were doing was wrong. That’s why they were so secretive about it.

Driving the news: In the aftermath of a blockbuster report from The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow — which details that MIT Media Lab’s director Joi Ito flew to Epstein’s private island twice and accepted more than $8 million of donations from him — Ito resigned on Saturday from MIT Media Lab, left his board seat with the New York Times Company, and resigned from the MacArthur Foundation.

  • Leon Black remains the chairman and CEO of private equity giant Apollo; he’s also the chairman of the board of the Museum of Modern Art. Black donated $5.5 million to the Media Lab at Epstein’s behest, on top of a $10 million donation that he made directly to Epstein’s own foundation in 2015.
  • Bill Gates donated $2 million to the Media Lab in October 2014; Ito claimed at the time that the gift was “directed by Jeffrey Epstein”. Gates asked that his name be kept out of any public discussion of the donation.
  • Reid Hoffman, the venture capitalist and founder of LinkedIn, hosted dinners for Epstein featuring the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. He also sits on the jury of the Media Lab’s Disobedience Award. (Epstein received an orb, which looks exactly like the Disobedience Award, for his service to the Lab.) When author and fellow juror Anand Giridharadas raised questions about the award’s ties to Epstein, Hoffman was the man who slapped him down.
  • Outside the Media Lab there are many other names. The UK’s Prince Andrew was close to Epstein both before and after Epstein’s conviction, as was lawyer Alan Dershowitz. There are multiple connections between Epstein and Harvard, including a “special connection” with Lawrence Summers. 

Naturally there are ties to Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, too.

Epstein’s enablers flew on his jets and visited his island and did multi-million-dollar deals with him even after he was convicted and jailed on a charge of soliciting underage girls for prostitution. Now they are starting to be held to account for their complicity.

None of these men are giving straight answers to questions about their involvement with Epstein.

Except, of course, for Donald Trump, because unlike the others, he has nothing to hide.



This pretty much summarizes it

I was asked my thoughts on the Baptist church, in which I was raised, on the Darkstream the other night, and this Babylon Bee article pretty much summarizes the full extent of my opinion on it:

Sources at Biloxi Seventh Baptist Church confirmed Tuesday that the entire church body is still pretending never to drink alcoholic beverages. Based on the church’s strong convictions, every member of the church is staunchly committed to pretend to abstain from alcohol while in the presence of other Baptists.

“It’s important to avoid the appearance of evil,” said church member Fred Myers. “That’s why I committed a long time ago to never let on that I love downing a few craft beers during a ball game on the weekends.” Myers always orders a Diet Coke when with his Baptist friends and family, though he’s been known to order a beer on tap as long as he’s in another state where no one can recognize him.

Other members of the church share the same commitment. Take Ethel Carver, 82. She credits her long life to her zealous dedication to the Lord, eating lots of fruits, vegetables, and casseroles, and pretending not to down two shots of whiskey before bed every night.

“Ever since I was a little girl, my parents raised me right, the Baptist way,” she said. “We don’t smoke, we don’t chew, we don’t drink alcohol unless no other Baptists are around. Just like the Bible says.”

Baptists and Southern Baptists chose the Churchian path back in 1880. Perhaps that didn’t matter as much then, when society was predominantly Christian. But it definitely matters now. Prohibition is a man-made dogma and has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity. But growing up amongst rampant Baptist hypocrisy did provide me with an effective anti-BS radar as well as an instinctive contempt for Bible-lawyering, as the ridiculous contortions involved in asserting that all the references to “wine” in the Bible actually refer to “non-alcoholic grape juice” made the divide between Christianity and Churchianity hard to miss, even for children.

Southern Baptists had worked at least three decades to secure legal prohibition. They saw the 18th Amendment as a culmination of their labor. They also had come to view prohibition advocacy as a defining mark of Baptist identity…. Since 1934, the SBC has adopted at least 35 statements opposing alcohol, the latest in 2006.

Now they see opposing racism, nationalism, identity politics, and patriotism as defining marks of Baptist identity. And they’ll oppose those things even less successfully than they opposed alcohol, which is why the Baptist identity will fade away over time in the same way that the Abecedarian and Episcopalian identities have.


Literal treason

Who on Earth would trust these treacherous weasels with any sort of “negotiations” with the European Union?

Senior MPs opposing a no-deal Brexit sought assurances from the EU that their bid for a three-month delay would be granted, it has emerged.

European leaders were sounded out before MPs, including the “rebel alliance”, passed a bill, which is expected to receive royal assent on Monday, forcing Boris Johnson to ask for an extension. However, those involved said there were no guarantees in a process that was changing by the day.

It comes as the rebels, including former Tories who have been thrown out of the party, prepare for a legal battle in case the prime minister attempts to defy a law forcing him to ask for an extension on 19 October. The UK is due to leave the EU on 31 October, but the new law would envisage a Brexit extension until the end of January 2020.

The sounding of EU leaders over an extension has angered Tory Brexiters. The Conservative MP and former cabinet minister David Jones said: “Senior EU figures gave private assurances to British MPs, as a consequence of which they supported the surrender bill. This confirms the level of EU interference in our internal affairs and makes the need for Brexit all the more pressing.”

No wonder they’re terrified of an election. It’s becoming abundantly clear that the Fixed Term Parliament law was passed specifically in order to prevent the British people from being able to replace an openly anti-democratic parliament like the current one.

Notice how the various national legislatures across Europe have gone from being popular and democratically elected to openly election-avoidant and anti-democratic. This is another indication of the social mood trend having peaked and reversed. We are winning, whether you recognize it or not yet.

Apparently, their treason didn’t do them much good, though.

France today said the EU will not agree a Brexit delay beyond October 31 amid claims Boris Johnson will defy the law and ‘sabotage’ an extension if he is unable to strike a deal with Brussels.

It’s important to remember that a national leader with the people behind him doesn’t have to follow the rules imposed by the bureaucracy. The so-called “law” is nothing but a mutually agreed-upon illusion, so once mutual agreement fails or the illusion evaporates, there is no more rule of law.

And the Prime Minister does appear to be playing for keeps. One can’t defy convention and then affect surprise when others do the same in response.

John Bercow’s role in blocking Brexit has sealed his fate as Commons Speaker, one of Boris Johnson’s most senior Ministers revealed yesterday. Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom today confirms for the first time that the Conservative Party will defy convention and put up a candidate against him in the next Election.


Just the first step

Marvel is deeply committed to giving you more of what you don’t want:

Marvel Studios executive producer Trinh Tran recently commented about Marvel’s Phase 4 and beyond plans noting “this is the first step to more diverse characters and franchises.”

Tran spoke with Inverse shortly after San Diego Comic-Con to discuss Phase 4 and its “visibility of women and superheroes of color.”

Tran stated, “Female representation, the diversity of it all, is very important because this is the world we live in.” She added, “There’s so many different people out there and in order for us to relate to them, we have to make movies that are different. We can’t always be about one race or gender. That’s not the way to connect with the world.”

Tran would then go on to explain she’s excited about the upcoming Black Widow and Shang-Chi film before noting these Phase 4 films are just the first step for Marvel Studios.

“This is the first step to more diverse characters and franchises. I am hoping for more down the line. We have so many characters in the Marvel Universe, it’s a matter of picking which one makes sense to the MCU.”

She adds:

“In thinking about the future of the MCU and how all those characters are gonna connect, diversity is crucial in our future.”

Tran then states, “I think we’re heading towards the right direction. Ten years ago when we started making these movies, you probably don’t see much of that.”

Arkhaven is going in precisely the opposite direction. Time will tell which was the right choice.


NFL Coach of the Year

We’re only one game – not one week, one game – into the NFL season and it’s already clear that Mike Tomlin deserves to be named Coach of the Year for having dealt successfully with Antonio Brown for nine years. This may actually be a more impressive coaching feat than Bill Belichick’s six Super Bowl victories, given that even a Super Bowl-winning coach like Jon Gruden couldn’t keep him in check for nine weeks.

Antonio Brown asked the Raiders to release him in an Instagram post shared Saturday morning.

The request comes shortly after news broke that Oakland had fined Brown $215,073.53 on Friday night for conduct detrimental to the team on Sept. 4, which Raiders voided the $29.125 million worth of guaranteed money in his deal, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter. In addition to fining Brown for conduct and voiding the guaranteed money in his contract, the Raiders reportedly sent Brown a letter stating that he no longer will be entitled to termination pay if they release him.

Antonio Brown actually makes Terrell Owens look reasonable in retrospect.

UPDATE: After the Raiders wiped out more than $29 million in guaranteed money under Brown’s contract with the team, Brown asked to be released. And the Raiders have released him.

UPDATE: Antonio Brown is now a New England Patriot.


“You should just sue them”

This outcome in the Mignogna lawsuit is precisely why I unmercifully ridicule those morons who jabber about how people should “just sue” everyone who criticizes or crosses them in any way.

Following Friday’s hearing in Tarrant County District Court, Judge John P. Chupp ruled to dismiss the majority of the charges against Funimation, Jamie Marchi, Monica Rial, and Ron Toye in the ongoing defamation lawsuit brought by Dragon Ball Super: Broly voice actor Vic Mignogna.

Friday’s hearing was to rule on the defendants’ respective Motions to Dismiss under the Texas Citizens Participation Act (TCPA). Judge Chupp dismissed the case against Marchi along with the charges of tortious interference of existing contracts and tortious interference of business relations allegations against Rial and Toye and the charges of tortious interference and civil conspiracy against Funimation. Judge Chupp has 30 days to rule on the charges of defamation against Funimation, Rial, and Toye, as well as a charge of conspiracy against Rial and Toye….

As per the TCPA, Chupp’s ruling will require Mignogna to cover the entirety of Marchi’s legal fees, a portion of Funimation, Rial, and Toye’s fees, and pay a fine in amount to be determined by the court.

Lawsuits are very expensive, in both temporal and monetary terms, even when you win. And there is always the risk of being required to cover the other side’s legal fees if you lose. This is why it makes no sense to casually threaten lawsuits; in fact, anyone who does so can be safely ignored as a clueless idiot.

And most lawyers, even the very expensive ones, are literally worse than useless. It would shock you to know how ignorant of their very areas of expertise most of them are, and how carelessly they regard unimportant little things like “deadlines” and “documentation”.


“Mainstream conservatives are traitorous cunts”

And they should never be trusted. Ben Shapiru proves, once more, that GamerGate was right.

Jamie R. Riley, the University of Alabama’s assistant vice president and dean of students, resigned from his position on Thursday after less than seven months on the job, UA officials confirmed.

His resignation comes a day after Breitbart News published an article detailing images of past tweets from Riley, in which he criticized the American flag and made a connection between police and racism.

Jackson Fuentes, press secretary for the UA Student Government Association, confirmed at 4:15 p.m. that Riley is no longer working at the University.

This is a clear-cut win for the Right. And yet somehow, for some reason, (((conservatives))) such as Shapiru and Ekaterina Jung are very, very determined to convince the Right that winning battles is the way to lose the cultural war.

Ben Shapiru@benshapiru
I disagree with this person’s tweets. He shouldn’t lose his job. Also, those on the Left who are livid he lost his job should take a look in the mirror about the world they’ve built, and in which both sides will now play by their ugly rules.

The rules are what they are, Benny. Ugly or not, they are the rules and if you don’t play by them, you cannot win. That’s true of everything from backgammon to basketball. So, the obvious question is, why are you so intent on preventing the Right from winning, Benny?

Remember, they assert that the main lesson of GamerGate for conservatives is to never ally yourself with anyone unsavory or unseemly who might actually help you win a battle or two.


A fake conservative’s fake history of GamerGate

Neoclown Ekaterina Jung is more concerned with attempting to gatekeep conservatives and keep them away from those unsavory nationalists who might actually try to win rather than go down in graceful defeat than she is in actually addressing any of the actual history in an article that purports – mostly falsely – to explain GamerGate four years later:

Was GamerGate a precursor to the alt-right and did it prepare the ground for Trump’s election?

In a literal sense, the answer to the first part is a clear no: The alt-right as a white nationalist fringe existed at least since 2010, when Richard Spencer launched the Alternative Right website. However, it is true that the alt-right’s online presence skyrocketed in 2015 and that a major vehicle for its attempted mainstreaming was Breitbart, the right-wing site which also embraced GamerGate.

In his perceptive Vox article in 2014, Klein noted that despite the left-of-center politics of most GamerGaters, media treatment of the controversy had been sharply divided along left/right lines: Liberal opinion was “in lockstep against Gamergate,” while some conservatives and critics of the social justice left were sympathetic. Breitbart, in particular, made GamerGate its pet cause, starting with a September 1, 2014 article by the soon-to-be-infamous Milo Yiannopoulos titled “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.” Yiannopoulos also championed GamerGate on Twitter; with his flashy bad-boy persona, he quickly became a hero to many in the movement, even those who otherwise had no affection for Breitbart’s politics.

It is also true that there were alt-right-type elements within GamerGate. As I cautioned in an early article on the movement, any backlash against extremist versions of feminism and “social justice” is likely to be a magnet for actual misogynists, bigots, and far-right extremists. (Ironically, one example I cited was pro-GamerGate lawyer Mike Cernovich, whose past misogynist tweets had been flagged by a GamerGate opponent — and who went on to become a prominent alt-right figure before eventually attempting to distance himself from the extremist fringe.) There were also the “edgy” teens who came in by way of “/pol/,” the 4chan “Politically Incorrect” board notorious for racist and anti-Semitic memes, and who thought it was good fun to post a cartoon of Sarkeesian as a greedy Jew.

“Since GamerGate didn’t have any sort of people controlling its population, and it was nominally against leftists, it attracted /pol/, obviously,” a Jewish GamerGater who wanted to be identified only as David, a politically centrist tech worker in his late twenties, told me in an email. Yet David also stressed that he saw “very little” anti-Semitism in GamerGate-related conversations and made many Jewish friends through the movement.

Far from setting the tone in GamerGate, its far-right members felt sufficiently embattled to start a separate 8chan forum, /ggrevolt/ (GamerGate Revolt); its denizens often disliked “regular” GamerGaters at least as much as they did “social justice warriors.” Video blogger June Lapine (“Shoe0nHead” on YouTube), a 28-year-old New Yorker who was involved with GamerGate from the start, says that /ggrevolt/ was her “first introduction to what [the] ‘alt-right’ was.”

There is strong evidence that as the alt-right began to gather steam in late 2015, Yiannopoulos tried to channel GamerGate — which he often tried to treat as his private army — in its direction. In January 2016, someone leaked chat logs in which pro-GamerGate blogger Ethan Ralph, who was close to Yiannopoulos, and several of his friends from /ggrevolt/ trashed GamerGate, agreed that the culture war needed to move on to the alt-right, and discussed plans to “reappropriate” GamerGate for the alt-right by purging liberals, who were mocked as “SJW-lite.” These revelations, which coincided with intensifying harassment of GamerGaters by /ggrevolt/ types, rocked what remained of GamerGate and got Ralph banned from the Kotaku In Action board (which did not stop The Daily Dot from calling Ralph a “GamerGate leader” when he was arrested several months later for assaulting a police officer).

In the end, the GamerGate-to-Alt-Right pipeline never materialized. However, a number of previously liberal GamerGaters did get on the “Trump Train” in 2016. At present, still-active GamerGaters to whom I have spoken estimate that about half of the posters on Kotaku In Action are pro-Trump. Some may have fallen for the Breitbart lure; others saw Trump as the answer to “political correctness” or shared his hostility to the mainstream media, which they (correctly) felt had been extremely shoddy and biased in its GamerGate coverage.

The slide toward Trumpism disappointed many GamerGate sympathizers; it also made some left-of-center GamerGaters such as Matt Jarbo — a.k.a. “Mundane Matt,” the YouTuber whose video on the Quinn cronyism allegations helped start the controversy — worry if they’ve helped elect Trump. “I definitely don’t want that on my conscience,” Jarbo joked uneasily in our recent interview. Others, such as fellow YouTuber Lapine, a self-described “proud social democrat,” dismiss the idea as “delusional.” As Lapine puts it, “everyone is always pointing fingers at who is to blame for Trump.”

Jung is just trying to work in a hit piece attacking the nationalist Right that she fears while ostensibly writing about GamerGate. It’s highly amusing that she takes shots at both Milo and Cerno, as well as the Alt Right, without ever mentioning the one individual who was, unlike either Mike or Milo, both a pre-Quinnspiracy OGGer and openly Alt-Right.

But mostly it’s bad journalism; she doesn’t bother to talk to any of the major GamerGate figures or follow-up on what has happened to them since, she has no idea why the backlash to GameJournoPros took place or even mention the exposure of the conspiracy and the mailing list, and she completely fails to make the connection between the tactics successfully utilized by GamerGate and the tactics that are now commonly used for everything from Sad Puppies to consumer lawfare against the SJWs and the social media giants.

Consider what Jung claims to be the moral of the GamerGate story for conservatives:

For critics of the left, the main moral of the story is that it’s important to repudiate unsavory allies.

In other words, please cuck. This is absolutely and entirely false. If you want to understand GamerGate, you’d do far better to simply read chapter 8 of SJWS ALWAYS LIE, Striking Back at the Thought Police, which explained the relationship between GamerGate and Donald Trump back in 2015 at the very start of the chapter.

The reason SJWs have been so successful since the 1990s is that for more than two decades, they simply did not meet with any serious or organized resistance. #GamerGate represented the first serious organized resistance to them, and in only one year, the intrepid warriors of the gamer community have inspired similar resistance movements to surface in science fiction, in comics, and in romance. Echoes of #GamerGate have begun to appear in the popular culture, as Donald Trump not only refused to kowtow before Fox News’s Megyn Kelly flashing of the SJWs’ Woman card during the U.S. presidential debate but afterwards declared political correctness to be a big problem in the U.S.A. Trump’s unexpected popularity in the polls is, to a large extent, a consequence of his willingness to confront the SJW Narrative and speak the truth as he sees it.

#GamerGate tactics are also beginning to be adopted by other groups for unrelated purposes, as there is a distinctly GG tone to the anti-Planned Parenthood memes that have been cropping up on Twitter ever since The Center for Medical Progress began releasing its sting-videos that showed Planned Parenthood employees openly discussing the sale of human organs taken from the infants it aborts. American immigration opponents have also successfully tarred some of the leading Republican candidates as well as their media supporters with the #cuckservative hashtag, much to the dismay of both the G.O.P. elite and the New York Times alike. It is therefore little wonder that SJWs are terrified of #GamerGate and see it as their most fearsome enemy.

An actual GamerGater commenting on Instapundit provides a much better summary.

I was in gamergate and it had several interesting aspects that I personally witnessed.

1. Gamergate was first time I learned that SJWs don’t really care who they demonize. We had many Lefty type gamers that were astonished that they too would be declared “bad people” for defending their hobby.

2. Organizations have more money then you could make a dent into with a boycott, but nobody ever has enough time. We learned that you can overwhelm an organization’s customer facing department and PR with email and phone call campaigns.

3. Never ever ever make someone a leader. The Media loves to find leaders and smear them to smear the movement by proxy. Lots of people got smeared, lots of people lost their jobs.

4. Mainstream conservatives are traitorous cunts and should never be trusted to guard an outhouse. We tried to get so called conservative journalists interested in what we were doing. Most ignored us as they thought we were just “a bunch of nerds playing games in mom’s basement”, and of course we had the shitheads that said we were misogynists and games cause violence. In the end one guy gave us a fair shake, Milo Yiannopoulos and started giving us coverage. As per their nature the conservatives tried to deep six his ass and sent him to the fringes of society and the MSM was just giddy with the results.


The Hu unplugged

It turns out metal doesn’t require distorted guitars or electricity. And given where they are playing, the lyrics could hardly be more appropriate.