Mark Levin interviewed Schweizer on his Sunday show, and the author discussed how the Vermont socialist became [...]]]>
Peter Schweizer’s new book, Profiles in Corruption, spends around 70 pages reporting on the Biden family business of using government to become rich as reported here recently, but Senator and Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is no slouch either.
Mark Levin interviewed Schweizer on his Sunday show, and the author discussed how the Vermont socialist became a millionaire by utilizing government schemes available to members of Congress and those in other powerful positions.
One Washington scam that Schweizer explained centered around media purchases. The person who acts as a candidate’s agent for buying media gets a commission —15 percent is standard — which can amount to a hefty sum in these days of big spending for campaigns. So Bernie made his wife Jane his media buyer to keep the money in the family.
He also created a job for her when he was mayor of Burlington with no authorization or budget from the city council. It’s good to be the king.
These and other government-manipulating strategies for amassing cash are how the socialist man of the people got wealthy.
Of course, such enriching opportunities are not available for ordinary citizens.
]]>MARK LEVIN: We have Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders as he calls himself a Democratic Socialist he’s really an out-of-the-closet hardcore socialist when you look at his career. He hasn’t done anything in the private sector that’s been productive, but he’s a multi-millionaire.
PETER SCHWEIZER: That’s right, and it’s interesting; you’re right, he describes himself and his policies are certainly hard core socialist. If you look at his investment for portfolio — this will surprise a lot of people — he’s invested in Fortune 500 companies. He’s not invested in renewable energy companies or socially responsible investment funds. And when you look at his public career since the 1980s as mayor of Burlington, and then a congressman, and then the senator and presidential candidate — it all revolves around bringing money into the family.
So take back to Burlington, Vermont, he is the mayor. One of the first things he does, Mark, as he says I’m gonna hire my girlfriend and put her on the city payroll. Jane Sanders, who’s now his wife was put on the payroll, and you go back and look at the local press accounts and you realize the city council said wait a minute: you’re giving her a job that we didn’t actually create, we haven’t funded and if this position were to exist you never advertised it. You never gave other people the opportunity to to take it, or to apply for it and Bernie just blew him off. So Jane had a paid job throughout his tenure.
When he ran for Congress, he discovered a secret that a lot of Washington insiders know, Mark, which is you can make a lot of money doing media buys for political campaigns. So for example, if you were a candidate for the United States Senate and you wanted to buy a million dollars in advertising and I did that purchase, I would get the million dollars, but the standard practice is I would get to keep about 15 percent as a commission.
She’d make a lot of money doing media buys, so what does Bernie Sanders do? He’s running for Congress in Vermont — he makes his wife Jane responsible for media buys, and we estimate based on the numbers . . . they set up an LLC which they registered at their home in Vermont and the owners were his wife Jane Sanders and their two children.
So it’s quite a cozy setup; so we estimate they probably made $150,000 off of that arrangement — he’s quite the crony capitalist. The big question mark that we don’t know the answer to but we have suspicions comes with the 2016 presidential race. We’re not talking about small media buys now, we’re talking about his campaign spending $83 million on media buys which means the commission is somewhere around $12 million. So who did the $83 million dollars? Where did that $83 million flow?
It went through this company called Old Town Media. Now you look up Old Town Media. It has no website; it has no footprint. It’s registered to a suburban Virginia home on a cul-de-sac. Then you find out who owns this entity — it happens to be two individuals who worked with Jane Sanders doing media buys when Bernie was running for Congress. Now Jane was asked about this by a progressive reporter actually from Vermont during the 2016 election — what did she know about Old Town Media? Did she have any involvement in it?
According the reporter, she hung up the phone.
So the question is, where did that money go? It certainly fits the pattern that we’ve seen with Bernie Sanders who for decades, for about 36 years by our accounts used the phrase, “Our politics should not be dominated by billionaires and millionaires.”
About three years ago he dropped the reference to millionaires because he’s now one, and I think the the big surprise that a lot of supporters will find is this is an individual who talks about socialism certainly has not conducted himself, his investments and and his family life not being interested in each other.
LEVIN: That’s typical of oligarchs in Russia. In these other totalitarian regimes and whether they’re communist or fascist or whatever, it’s one thing for the people, right, but it’s another thing for them, so this is an area the media and Bernie Sanders’ opponent should really pursue, nail it down.
SCHWEIZER: Yeah, absolutely it should, and you know the other thing that comes through in all this, Mark, is if you look in the Vermont press and a lot of the interviews, Bernie Sanders does not dislike or hate all rich people. He only dislikes and hates rich people who are opposed to his agenda.
So you find that there are very prominent wealthy people in Vermont who have vested interests who he goes to bat for all the time at the expense of local people. For example, there’s a gentleman who is creating these large-scale industrial wind farms where they put these big windmills, dozens of them, and if you live next door to it, suddenly you’ve got these huge windmills all around you.
Those landowners sue trying to stop him from building these — which side does Bernie come down on? On the side of Mr. Blittersdorf who’s doing this why because Blittersdorf backs him and is supportive of his campaigns.
The newer, more controversial viewpoint is that only the victims or actual [...]]]>
The newer, more controversial viewpoint is that only the victims or actual tribal members should be allowed to speak because non-diverse people are taking up too much space in the marketplace of ideas and opinions.
The book in question is American Dirt: A Novel, written by Jeanine Cummins, “who has a Puerto Rican grandmother,” the New York Times observes — which clearly is not sufficient for some people.
The Times published a front-page photo of the author, a person “who identifies as white and Latina.”
On Monday, the Los Angeles Times included a front-page story about the fracas, ‘American Dirt’ was supposed to be a publishing triumph. What went wrong?, noting the “angry charges of cultural appropriation, stereotyping, insensitivity, and even racism against author Jeanine Cummins.” So the mainstream media must think that Immigration Diversity is too important to have disagreements.
One complaint was about barbwire floral arrangements at a book promotion dinner because it would disrespect illegal alien invaders, or something.
The New York Times article explained how complicated it can be for the publishing business to accommodate diversity ideology — including having “sensitivity readers” on staff to catch any politically incorrect bits that might upset someone, somewhere.
]]>As ‘American Dirt’ Racks Up Sales, Its Author Becomes the Story, New York Times, January 25, 2020
“American Dirt” seemed poised to become one of this year’s biggest, buzziest books.
When it came up for auction in 2018, the novel — about a desperate Mexican mother and son who flee for the United States border after a drug cartel massacres their family — set off a bidding war and sold to a publisher for seven figures. It drew rapturous endorsements from novelists like Stephen King and Sandra Cisneros, and got glowing advance reviews from industry publications that hailed the book as propulsive and heart-wrenching.
The author, Jeanine Cummins, has said she hoped the novel would drive discussions about immigration policy, and open “a back door into a bigger conversation about who we want to be as a country.” Since then, “American Dirt” has certainly ignited a vigorous conversation — but hardly the one the author and publisher intended.
Even before the book hit shelves this past week, a growing chorus of online critics was challenging the hoopla, accusing Ms. Cummins, who identifies as white and Latina, of having exploited the experience of migrants and repackaging it as opportunistic “trauma porn” for a predominantly white publishing industry.
Criticism intensified on Tuesday, after Oprah Winfrey anointed the novel as her next book club pick, in a splashy joint appearance on “CBS This Morning” with the author, whom Ms. Winfrey said she hoped to interview near the border for her book club program.
It was an extraordinary convergence of forces: Industry hype meets charges of cultural appropriation meets one of the most combustible political issues in America today, immigration.
And that was before a photograph from a lavish book promotion dinner last spring, showing a faux-barbed-wire floral decoration, began circulating on Twitter, where it was vilified as “border chic.” So was a resurfaced tweet from last fall in which Ms. Cummins cheered a fan’s manicure inspired by her book’s cover, complete with more barbed wire.
The controversy lands at a moment when debates about race and representation are front and center across the cultural and political landscape, from the Academy Awards, which faces yet another #OscarsSoWhite outcry, to the National Football League, where the number of minority head coaches is falling, to the Democratic presidential primary, where the most diverse field of candidates in history has narrowed to a nearly all-white group.
It also falls right into the roiling argument over art and cultural appropriation — how the stories of marginalized people should be told and who should be given the platforms to tell them. Social media has elevated more voices, but also brought greater scrutiny to the decisions of businesses and tastemakers like Ms. Winfrey who are trying to build broader audiences.
Opinions are hardly monolithic. When the white painter Dana Schutz drew fire for “Open Casket,” a painting of Emmett Till included in the 2018 Whitney Biennial, some black artists denounced her for exploiting black pain, demanding the work be removed or even destroyed. Others defended the artist’s right to take on any subject.
The literary world has been wrestling with the same questions, particularly in the young adult sector, where authors and publishers now routinely rely on sensitivity readers to help defend against potential racial and cultural blind spots. (Continues)
Friday’s New York Times front page included an article with the newsprint title Facing Queries [...]]]>
Friday’s New York Times front page included an article with the newsprint title Facing Queries About His Son, Biden Is by Turns Calm or Curt (reprinted by MSN.com). So it appears the elite media is pulling back its support for the 2020 candidate.
What’s notable about the Biden clan is how many family members rode the gravy train to riches on the basis of the name and influence. Schweizer has dug up people beyond Hunter that most Americans have never heard of.
Below, the Biden family alleged crooks include (left to right) Joe’s brother James, son Hunter, son-in-law Howard Krein, brother Frank and sister Valerie Biden Owens.
Lou Dobbs recently interviewed the author to get a taste of the Biden family business. Dobbs seemed amazed and almost amused by the brazen arrogance of the clan.
Spare audio:
Schweizer noted how atypical it is for so many family members to be engaged in corruption-based crime:
“It’s remarkable. I mean the Biden family, you’ve got five family members involved. I call them the Biden Five; they’re like the Jackson Five but they don’t sing, it’s corruption, and I’ve never seen this before. You know we’ve talked many times, Lou, on your show about corruption involving Democrats, Republicans. Maybe there’s one family member, maybe there’s two. . .
I’ve never run across one that has five, and on top of the fact that there are five involved, it’s like a corrupt United Nations. You’ve got Hunter Biden doing deals in Ukraine, doing deals in China with state actors, corrupt old guards; you got the brother James who’s with this construction firm that’s set up by a family friend. They get the contract to build a hundred thousand homes in Iraq they get contracts to do work for the State Department’s. Then you’ve got this other brother Frank meeting with the Costa Rican president for these energy deals, and of course he has no background in energy. It just goes on and on.”
For more details on the family members, see Schweizer’s New York Post article, How five members of Joe Biden’s family got rich through his connections.
The book ranked #1 on Amazon 10 days before release, surely based on Schweizer’s reputation as a thorough investigator. It won’t help Joe Biden’s faltering campaign, that’s for sure. Other Democrats get criticism as well: the table of contents shows chapters on Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.
]]>His previous book, The Strange Death of Europe, was excellent, and you can read my review in The Social Contract journal, Suicide by Immigration — Has Europe given [...]]]>
Author Douglas Murray has just published a new book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, which analyses the increasingly irrational behavior of humans in groups.
His previous book, The Strange Death of Europe, was excellent, and you can read my review in The Social Contract journal, Suicide by Immigration — Has Europe given up on Itself?.
Murray’s new book appears to be similarly astute, and he appeared recently for an interview with Tucker Carlson to sort through the current craziness in society.
Too bad the discussion wasn’t longer. A more in-depth exchange between these two would be worthwhile to say the least.
Audio version:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Issues like wearing blackface decades ago are big news, in part because the entire western world has become obsessed with identity politics.
Top Democrats in particular are going on, we could give you a thousand examples. We just picked a couple out of the bin.
During a recent rally in New York City, Senator Elizabeth Warren cast her frontrunner campaign as one that excludes men. Listen to this:
SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: I am especially glad to be here in Washington Square Park. I wanted to give this speech right here, and not because of the arch behind me, or the president that this square is named for. Nope. We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men. In fact, we’re not here because of men at all.
CARLSON: Yes, because you don’t have fathers or anything because biology is not real. Georgia conspiracy theorist, meanwhile, and inevitable vice presidential nominee Stacey Abrams is explicit about how much she loves identity politics. Watch this:
FORMER GEORGIA LEGISLATOR STACEY ABRAMS: I lean in to identity politics. In fact, I believe in identity politics. And I believe identity politics are the only politics that win. And I don’t think you should fight me for that because you have an identity too.
CARLSON: So what’s driving this new obsession with identity politics? And is there any way out of it, this vortex? No one has thought more deeply about this than Douglas Murray. He is the author of a book that you have got to read. It’s called, “The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity.” It just came out. I was up late reading it last night and it is absolutely fantastic. Douglas Murray joins us tonight. Douglas, thanks so much for coming on.
AUTHOR DOUGLAS MURRAY: It’s a real pleasure, Tucker.
CARLSON: The identity politics pushes so many emotional buttons in people that it’s very hard to step back far enough as you have in this book, to consider what it means. What’s the point of this? Why are they doing this? Why are they doing it?
MURRAY: Well, there are several reasons. There are different groups of people who are responsible. There is one group who are just pushing this because this is naked politics and this — I take each of these issues in “The Madness of Crowds” one by one.
I do gay, women, race and trans; and in each of these ones, you see the naked root politics at some point. For instance, you get the thing where there are there are gay people who are conservative and therefore denounced by the gay press is no longer gay. I, by the way, had that again this week in America.
Then you get women who have the wrong politics, i.e. conservative and they’ve said to no longer be feminists. You have, you have black Americans who have conservative politics, and they are denounced as no longer black, and this keeps happening.
And at those points you see, that’s just naked politicking. You are using identity groups to batter down a political point, and that’s undoubtedly the case of a lot of people. There are other things going on here, too.
One of them, I show in the book, is just a continuation of an old Marxist idea. You know, there were from the 70s and 80s onwards, a group of people, Marxists and post-Marxists for whom the working class have let them down. You know, the working class never did come up with a revolution in America that they wanted.
CARLSON: No, that’s true.
MURRAY: And they wanted to get these new groups as they saw them, identity groups, ethnic identity groups, racial identity groups, and minority sexual identity groups. They wanted these people to all be brought together to further and actually, this time bring about the revolution that the working class that proved such a loser for them on.
And so several things, but those two, I think are the most pernicious and the problem I have with this, I’ll just say, is that a lot of young people now are growing up in America, are being lied to that this is actually about virtue, that this is actually how they should be their lives, that they should spend their lives pursuing this zero sum game, this appalling zero sum game.
CARLSON: That’s right.
MURRAY: You know, gays against the straights, women against men, all ethnic groups against each other. Trans against absolutely everybody. And this is just a terrible way not just to do politics, but a horrible way to spend your life.
And we have to make sure that the next generation of young Americans that are being wooed into this are wooed out of it.
CARLSON: It does seem like an inexorable recipe for division. I mean, at its core, this politics is telling you to hate people on the basis of qualities they can’t control. I mean, how is that resolved? How can you fix that? I mean, doesn’t that always end up in the worst possible place?
MURRAY: We have to point out that the game they’re inviting us all to play cannot be won.
Nor this cannot be played — it specifically cannot be won. For instance, they do this privilege game, you know, people suffer from privilege, and therefore then — there is an example in Britain earlier this week with The Guardian, the main left wing newspaper, said that David Cameron, the former Prime Minister, may have experienced pain in his life, like the loss of his eldest son, the death of his eldest son, but it was only privileged pain he’d ever felt.
CARLSON: Oh my gosh. I can’t imagine that. That’s disgusting.
MURRAY: You’re trying to make a political point about privilege in order to bring some people down. And you decide, yes, well, he was one of the lucky ones, he lost his eldest son, because he is rich.
You know, I mean, this is the disgusting anti-human position that people get to if they go down this route. You know, they end up being profoundly anti-human. And, you know, I just think that again, we have to show people that these are not games that can be played or won.
You can never work out where exactly somebody’s privilege is. You know, Justin Trudeau is an incredibly privileged person in all sorts of ways.
CARLSON: I’ve noticed that.
MURRAY: You know, all of these people are playing this in American politics.
Now, Elizabeth Warren is by any stretch of imagination, unbelievably privileged person.
CARLSON: I know, but she is lecturing you on your privilege. Douglas Murray, come back. I hope you will join us once more. The Madness of Crowds — I recommend this book personally. It’s fantastic. Congratulations on that. Thank you for coming.
Unfortunately, the [...]]]>
Unfortunately, the Kochs are no friends of borders or national sovereignty, and Republicans’ failure to enact any restrictionist measures when they owned both the House and Senate in 2016-18 is due in part to the power of Koch money.
Tucker Carlson discussed the influential Koch brothers earlier this summer, noting that “the border is more porous than ever. . . you can thank the Kochs for that.”
On Wednesday, Tucker returned to the Koch topic, interviewing Christopher Leonard, author of the new book Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America:
Spare audio:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: For years, brothers, Charles and David Koch have been the two single most important donors on the American right. They’ve reshaped the Republican Party, according to their personal ideology. They made the party far more libertarian, much more pro-immigration, and more pro-Big Tech.
Even if the Republican Party has evolved and elected Donald Trump, the Koch brothers remain tremendously influential, more than you may understand. And if you’re frustrated, watching the party ignore what its own voters want, it is part of the reason.
Well, there is a new book out that takes a very close look at the Koch business and political empire. Chris Leonard is the author of it. It’s called “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.” We just spoke with him. Here’s what he said.
CARLSON: So for my perspective — my interest is the political activities of the Kochs who by the way, I can say, since I know them, are very nice people, personally.
CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: Absolutely. Absolutely.
CARLSON: But there’s a misconception in Washington that they’re conservative. Tell me what you discovered about their ideology after writing this book. Are they conservatives?
LEONARD: Well, you know, I think you’ve gotten it exactly right, in the sense that they’re not traditional conservatives, as you might think of that today.
Charles Koch is an engineer and you’re right, he is a really nice guy, I interviewed him for this book, I’ve been around the people who have worked for him for decades. Charles Koch believes he’s found the blueprint for how to organize society.
He is very libertarian. In his view, the best way to structure a society is just a free market exchange system. That’s it. And I call it a blueprint, intentionally. You can’t argue with a blueprint. If you mess up something in a blueprint, the building will collapse. You can’t argue with physics.
And I think Charles Koch sees his political ideology in that way. He believes that the only way you can structure society is as a market. And when the government intervenes, it ultimately does more harm than good in his view. It causes more problems than it solves.
CARLSON: So our viewers can assess what they think of their views. I do bet that most of our viewers disagree with them on immigration. They’ve been strong advocates, I would say for opening the borders. How powerful are they — the Koch brothers and Charles Koch — particularly within the Republican Party, would you say?
LEONARD: Extremely powerful. You nailed it at the beginning. Charles Koch has been patiently executing a political project since the mid-1970s, and that is to make America more libertarian and his goal in that, his primary goal has been to reshape the Republican Party.
And particularly since the 2000s, you’ve seen the Koch network writ large, which is a multifaceted machine that includes a grassroots group of people called Americans for Prosperity. It includes one of the largest corporate lobbying shops in the United States. It includes a constellation of think tanks here in Washington.
All of these resources have been put to bear to shift the Republican Party more toward what Charles Koch would call a classical liberal ideology, totally libertarian, basically moving the federal government back to the size it was in 1776.
CARLSON: So you’ve seen from the various Koch organizations, some of which you just listed recently, this line that we really don’t have anything to fear from Big Tech, that Republicans are being hysterical conservatives. This show for example, being hysterical about Google or Facebook, just calm down, everything is totally fine.
Why would they — which is obviously a lie — but why would they be telling us that?
LEONARD: So this is all part of the bigger picture in my view, and we have to go back to when Trump won the election and surprised the entire political landscape of America.
Donald Trump and what this administration is doing is essentially unacceptable to the Koch network, if you will, because Donald Trump has proven that his administration is willing to intervene in the markets to get a beneficial outcomes for the people who voted for him. That’s how I would put it. So Trump is willing to use tariffs.
Trump is willing to tear apart trade deals. And that impulse needs to be kept in check if you’re part of the Koch political machine. So if you start talking about regulating any company, if you start talking about regulating these tech companies, the Koch network is going to try to push you back off that as aggressively as they can.
CARLSON: Which you described in this book, which I would recommend to our viewers, are people who care more about ideas than outcomes, who really are ideologues in the classic sense of that term, and you know, maybe that’s appealing to people, and we will let viewers make up their own minds.
But this is an interesting book, “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.” Thank you very much, Chris.