Tag: corpocracy

Why the Answer is Always No

James O’Keefe appears to be going the way of Milo Yiannopoulos, as the Project Veritas board is actively working toward ejecting the organization’s founder.

James O’Keefe, the founder and chairman of Project Veritas, has taken a paid leave from the conservative nonprofit media organization as its board considers whether to remove him from his leadership position, according to current and former employees of the organization.

An internal message sent to Project Veritas employees by the organization’s executive director, Daniel Strack, said that O’Keefe would be taking “a few weeks of well-deserved PTO.” An image of the message was shared by a source familiar with the organization’s internal operations, and its authenticity was confirmed by a current employee. When reached for comment on his personal cell phone, O’Keefe said nothing in response and did not respond to follow-up calls and text messages. Through a Project Veritas spokesman, Strack later released a statement on behalf of the organization. “Like all newsrooms at this stage, the Project Veritas Board of Directors and Management are constantly evaluating what the best path forward is for the organization,” the statement read in part…

A meeting of the Project Veritas board is scheduled for Friday, when O’Keefe’s potential removal is set to be discussed, according to one source familiar with the matter. The source said that Project Veritas was currently divided between a group of employees who are perceived to be loyal to O’Keefe, including his communications adviser, R.C. Maxwell, and the board, which has been dissatisfied with what it perceives as O’Keefe’s mismanagement.

We’ve had people contacting us out of the blue about “investing” in Castalia and pretty much every other project since 2014. In the early days, when I would answer their emails or take their calls, they would talk about how much we would be able to accomplish if only we had more resources at our disposal and so forth. And, for the most part, what they were saying was more or less credible. But I grew up in tech, the son of a very successful entrepreneur, and I personally witnessed how pretty much every single founder who accepted investment or got acquired by a larger company, was ejected, sooner or later, regardless of how successful he was. So I don’t even respond to anyone anymore.

And it’s only worse for organizations that touch on the media and political worlds. Milo’s “investors” had a clause buried in the fine print that gave them the ability to convert their “investment” into a loan that he had to repay any time they decided to pull out and cut his legs out from under him. Which, of course, is exactly what they did. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Project Veritas board was stacked with directors whose primary objective has always been to remove O’Keefe from the organization as soon as the investors deemed it to be the right time to take control.

AC explains how it works, as well as how the free content from the subsidized gatekeepers tends to strangle independent operations.

In comes the angelic benefactor who hates the libs too, and wants to help and make it a job and pay his bills. And now he has a board, and people who can fire him from his own organization, and he probably has to hire the people donors ask them to hire. It is tough. That money they can throw at so many frauds like Shapiro to give all that free bullshit is why our side has so few who are really honest. There is so much free, there is no reason to pay anything.

That’s why the cult of free is a game of attrition where he who has the access to the most free money always wins. And that’s why, whether you’re an angelic benefactor or a perfectly honest capitalist who sees an intriguing vision, a smart team, and a strong track record of delivering success, the answer will always be no, absolutely not.

UPDATE: I’m told that much the same thing happened with Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept.

UPDATE: There is no room for reasonable doubt that the attempt to unseat O’Keefe is a premeditated corporate hit. The guy who is leading the charge only came on board four months ago, but O’Keefe appears to have quickly identified him as a bad actor

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Shakeups in Publishing

In the aftermath of the failed Simon & Schuster acquisition, Penguin Random House’s CEO has resigned only one month after her predecessor’s resignation:

Madeline McIntosh, one of the most powerful figures in American book publishing, is stepping down from her role as chief executive of Penguin Random House U.S., the company announced on Tuesday.

The announcement comes during a time of great turbulence for Penguin Random House, by far the country’s largest book publisher. Markus Dohle, who was the chief executive of Penguin Random House, and McIntosh’s boss, resigned from his position in December.

The company also lost a bid last year to buy Simon & Schuster, a large rival publishing house, after the government successfully sued to stop the deal on antitrust grounds. The deal’s collapse cost Penguin Random House a $200 million termination fee, in addition to enormous legal costs. Dohle had overseen the attempted acquisition.

McIntosh has been the head of Penguin Random House U.S. since 2018. Before that, she held a variety of roles at the company, which she first joined almost 30 years ago. She also worked briefly at Amazon.

This is going to have some major fallout in both companies. Expect sizeable layoffs in the industry.

In other news, it’s safe to anticipate that TOR Books is going to be acquired, probably by the same Chinese-funded Astra startup that acquired DAW Books. How long Chinese money is going to support the 白左 aka baizuo, which literally means “white left”, that run these publishing companies should be interesting to watch.

It appears Baen Books has undergone a reverse-revolution, as Toni is back, having unseated her erstwhile successor who proved to be a complete SJW. Precisely how the purchase of TOR will affect them is unknown, but TOR owns a substantial share of Baen, so they will be affected to at least some degree.

On the Castalia front, we have set up our own warehousing and shipping in the USA, which should go a long way toward addressing our longtime customer service issues and prevent us from becoming dependent upon Amazon. This service will begin in March. We also expect to be able to offer shipping services to independent authors and other publishers who want to sell their books directly to their readers, as well as eventually providing an Arktoons-to-print service for our comics creators.

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Another New Platform

When I advocated building our own platforms, I really didn’t think we were going to have to recreate freaking Amazon. But that’s the post-capitalistic Gamma World in which we find ourselves, so please bear with us as we construct a new way to purchase books directly from Castalia House, Arkhaven, and quite possibly other publishers.

Dear Shopper,

It has been our pleasure to help stores like this one set up their digital footprint and grow into a budding business. Unfortunately, as it stands, Aerio is no longer able to support eCommerce moving forward, but you can!

Though this Aerio store may no longer exist, we encourage you to continue buying directly from them at their new platform or site. Thank you for your past support of our Aerio booksellers and your continued support wherever their new store finds a home.

Our goal was to help bloggers, authors, publishers, and small bookstores expand their reach, and we encourage you to continue supporting this store however you can.

Sincerely,

The Aerio Team

Aerio never really quite worked the way it should have. They were always operating on a shoestring, and, in fact, we came very close to taking it over a few years ago after their first two attempts to get it operational failed. And even when they finally did get it working, they never addressed the two issues that they repeatedly promised to address, namely, a) providing free shipping and b) providing shipping to the UK and EU markets.

It could literally be a chapter in a business book on why corporate forays into new markets need to be walled-off from the primary business. So, it’s not a big surprise that it’s been shut down. However, this creates a very real opportunity for us, and one we intend to pursue, basically because it would be not only remiss, but retarded, to fail to do so.

In the meantime, there’s always Amazon, until there isn’t.

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Pfizer’s Non-Denial

Robert Malone observes a few salient facts about the Project Veritas bust of a Pfizer director admitting gain-of-function research on the coronavirus.

1) Pfizer lawyers did not throw their Director of R&D Operations and Scientific Planning under the bus. 2) there is no denial of what he said. 3) No denial that he is Pfizer staff. 4) Swapping new spike sequences into original Wuhan-1 is technically gain of function research. The press release from Pfizer only addresses the company’s own actions and statements regarding gain of function and directed evolution research. It does not specifically mention any contractors or partners that the company may be working with.

We all knew they’d be doing it. And YouTube, Google, and every other tech/media company wouldn’t be aggressively attacking the Project Veritas expose if it wasn’t real.

First the responsible parties release the disease, then they release the actual bioweapon as a purported cure. That’s what villains do, and the global depopulationists do it because they are very wicked people who are genuine villains seeking to reduce the human population. This isn’t a movie, this is the sort of reality that movies are based upon.

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Why They Take the Ticket

And all you have to give them is your soul.

Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing published a video Thursday disclosing and discussing a binding contract the company offered to podcast host Steven Crowder. The contract reveals that Daily Wire offered Crowder $50 million over four years. The deal included a two-year company option that, if exercised, would continue to pay Crowder $12.5 million a year.

Boreing expressed this was DW’s opening bid. The company was likely to bid — much — higher during negotiations, he states. Boreing posted the video in response to comments Crowder made on Tuesday about an unnamed conservative media company offering him a contract that contained, what he described as, penalties if Big Tech were to demonetize his content.

Crowder accused the company of enabling censorship with the following terms:

“If any of the major platforms (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, Apple Podcasts, Spotify) issues a content strike (other than a “companywide” content strike) such that Crowder content cannot be monetized on such platform, and the company is not able to resolve the issue within 90 days, then the fee will be reduced by 25% from that point forward.”

Precisely, the contract would allow the company to reduce Crowder’s salary if a content strike were to decrease the revenues the brand could generate from his program. For background, Crowder boasts nearly 6 million subscribers on YouTube. He has notoriously feuded with the video service over demonetization, censorship, and suspensions.

This makes it clear why YouTube banishes people like Owen Benjamin. He was over 300k subscribers when he was banned, and he probably would have been well over 1 million subscribers by now, which would have been worth about $2 million annually from a ticket-distributor like Daily Wire.

Of course, the money isn’t actually real, as evidenced by the fact that it has to be returned to sender upon the relocation of the ticket taker to Hell. Make no mistake. This isn’t genuine success. This is the satanic illusion of success that is on offer as bait.

That is why I always find it mystifying when people claim that I am jealous of the likes of John Scalzi, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, or Steven Crowder. Because you literally could not pay me to take their place.

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Yes, Actually

In which I answer a question posed by the inimitable Karl Denninger, whom I very much respect and who has arguably saved more lives than Florence Nightengale and David Hasselhoff combined.

Still Think Its Not Just Money?
Now we have documentation that Scott Gottlieb was involved in the Twitter Censorship on Covid.

Of course anything that dissuades you from being talked or even forced into spending money in the pharma world is bad from their point of view and Scott is on their board. May I remind you that this is a company that has been repeatedly fined huge amounts of money for various violations of both law and regulation?

Pharma has been a big advertiser on Twitter, of course. Can’t bite that hand with the stack of Benjamins in it, can you?

Then we got this report — a key study on an anti-stroke drug may have been falsified with potentially fatal side effects ignored.

That study dates to….. 2009.

So much for “they’re trying to kill you” eh?

Naw.

They just don’t care about anything except money.

Au contraire. I not only still think it’s not just money, I am absolutely, 100 percent, certain that it isn’t just money. Greed, after all, is only one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and Mammon is only one of the various false gods.

  • Adidas did not drop Kanye to make more money.
  • YouTube did not deplatform Owen Benjamin and me to make more money.
  • Patreon did not deplatform Owen Benjamin and Mr. Metokur to make more money.
  • Indiegogo did not return money to my backers to make more money.
  • British Petroleum, Exxon Mobile, and Shell did not exit Russia to make more money.
  • Disney did not throw its weight against the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida to make more money.
  • Intel did not spend $300 million on diversity and inclusion to make more money.
  • Every freaking commercial on TV did not introduce multiracial couples to make more money for either the advertising agency or the advertiser.

I could provide well over 10,000 examples of “profit-seeking” corporations making decisions that observably and inevitably harm their bottom line in the interest of aligning with the Satanic Narrative. But there is no need, since each and every reader is capable of providing a unique example from their own personal observations.

Those who assign to either stupidity or pecuniary interest the actions of the wicked simply fail to understand either the objectives or the nature of evil. This may sound like a criticism, but it is actually a testimony to the fundamental decency that makes it difficult for them to give credence to the true depths of human depravity.

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Is Elon Lying Again?

We know from first-hand experience that Elon Musk lied about permitting banned individuals to return to Twitter. So it wouldn’t be too terribly surprising if CDAN is correct and he is also failing to tell the truth about eradicating child porn from the platform.

Shortly after the celebrity CEO took over the bird site, the CEO enlisted many online influencers to boost lies about purported success at removing child porn from the site, most notably top hashtags used to advertise the stuff. I told you the celebrity CEO was lying, and that a major news organization was conducting a significant investigation exposing all of this. It was just recently published, and you should go and read it. Child porn has gotten worse on the bird site, not better, since the celebrity CEO took over.

The story is at NBC News. And while it’s worth noting that NBC doesn’t appear to have had any problem with the market in what it calls “child sexual abuse material” on Twitter until Musk bought it, that doesn’t change the fact that what he says is no longer on the platform is still on the platform.

Twitter accounts that offer to trade or sell child sexual abuse material under thinly veiled terms and hashtags have remained online for months, even after CEO Elon Musk said he would combat child exploitation on the platform.

“Priority #1,” Musk called it in a Nov. 20 tweet. He’s also criticized Twitter’s former leadership, claiming that they did little to address child sexual exploitation, and that he intended to change things.

But since that declaration, at least dozens of accounts have continued to post hundreds of tweets in aggregate using terms, abbreviations and hashtags indicating the sale of what Twitter calls child sexual exploitation material, according to a count of just a single day’s tweets. The signs and signals are well known among experts and law enforcement agencies that work to stop the spread of such material.

The tweets reviewed by NBC News offer to sell or trade content that is commonly known as child pornography or child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The tweets do not show CSAM, and NBC News did not view any CSAM in the course of reporting this article.

Some tweets and accounts have been up for months and predate Musk’s takeover. They remained live on the platform as of Friday morning.

Then again, it’s possible that this is just a whack-a-mole problem that is in the process of being resolved. The question is whether Musk has actually given meaningful orders to his employees to get the job done and they’re dragging their feet or if he’s merely acting as his own PR and marketing departments. But given our success in establishing and implementing SG’s Clean Speech policy, and the ease with which spam bots can be detected and eradicated, there really isn’t any excuse for not eliminating the garbage from the platform.

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Twitter Confessions

Elon Musk admits what we’ve known since 2017:

True, some accounts on the right were suspended even when Twitter internally acknowledged that no rules were broken

@elonmusk, 9 Dec 2022

Yes, I know. I never broke any of the Twitter rules. And yet, I’m still permanently suspended, without ever having a single violation of the rules cited.

Lesson: never trust a self-appointed Devil’s Champion.

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Disney Admits Racism

Disney is replacing Splash Mountain with Tiana’s Bayou Adventure:

Disney announced it would permanently close the iconic theme park ride on Jan. 23, 2023. According to Disney, Splash Mountain is racist. The ride promotes “racial stereotypes,” and thus must depart Magic Kingdom swiftly. Disney decided Splash Mountain was racist after complaints over the ride’s source material, the 1946 film “Song of the South,” which supposedly portrays plantation life as historically insensitive.

Moving forward, Disney plans to replace Splash Mountain with a ride entitled Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. TBA will carry on the legacy of “The Princess and the Frog,” which features a black heroine named Tiana. Disney says this ride, unlike the racist Splash Mountain, better represents Disney’s commitment to “diversity.”

It certainly better represents Disney’s commitment to self-extinction. Disney should simply cut to the chase and permanently shut itself down in order to amend for its vast panoply of crimes, past and present, against children and civilized society.

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