Hoffman, Reid
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FUNDED ELIAS DEMOC DOCKET? E JEAN CARROLL
:{THIEL paypal mafia, secret conf 6 26 epstein 2 yrs bef?
WH ANTIFa bs?
THIEL DIALOG
abundance, ezra bk spread
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mpu
...
6:49
6 minutes, 49 seconds
Thiel and Epstein exchanged a number of emails and seemed to be close, both personally and professionally.
6:54
6 minutes, 54 seconds
From investment advice, Thiel told Epstein not to invest in Spotify and only gave him a maybe to investing in Thiel's own company, Palantir.
7:01
7 minutes, 1 second
Eventually, Epstein invested millions in Thiel's venture capital fund, Valar Ventures,
7:07
7 minutes, 7 seconds
which means that Epstein had holdings in Stash Financial, Anduril, the autonomous killing machine company,
7:14
7 minutes, 14 seconds
something called Brat Inc, and other big tech companies.
7:18
7 minutes, 18 seconds
But Thiel's venture funds don't have a problem getting investors. So, we still need to figure out what Epstein truly offered, and we'll get to that.
7:26
7 minutes, 26 seconds
Reid Hoffman also frequently communicated with Epstein. Again, both about money, and just chillin'. Epstein advised Hoffman on large luxury purchases,
7:36
7 minutes, 36 seconds
tried to wrangle him into the DAF scheme, and Hoffman was generally one of Epstein's ins to Silicon Valley.
7:43
7 minutes, 43 seconds
In 2015, Hoffman invited Epstein to an intimate dinner with himself, Musk, Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, some neuroscientists, and a few others.
7:52
7 minutes, 52 seconds
Just months before over half that table would go on to found OpenAI. And AI was an interest of Epstein's.
7:58
7 minutes, 58 seconds
But this dinner epitomizes an important point here. The network.
8:02
8 minutes, 2 seconds
After PayPal, Hoffman created LinkedIn. [Anand] Reid Hoffman, an Epstein associate and founder of LinkedIn, has talked about in the future,
8:10
8 minutes, 10 seconds
your career will be the network, not a job hierarchy. And he, like Epstein, embodied the network.
8:17
8 minutes, 17 seconds
The network itself, not the individual people, is the key here. It's how they were all connected and what they all do for each other. And we can see that by using a new light.
...
10:56
10 minutes, 56 seconds
"hey, man, you shouldn't be doing all this stuff." In our networked age, there is a sense that if you can get yourself to the heart of a network like this,
11:04
11 minutes, 4 seconds
the world is your oyster. And at the same time, if you fall out of the network, it is a kind of death.
11:11
11 minutes, 11 seconds
We, the regular people, obviously shouldn't be emulating everything we see in these emails, but if we want to defeat this elite network, there's one thing we do need to do.
11:21
11 minutes, 21 seconds
When you actually see the way they're functioning in this network, they're all on the same team.
11:24
11 minutes, 24 seconds
There's this very powerful network of people who lobby and buy power and buy access and rig the world against regular people. And we're down here thinking that the guy two doors down from us is the biggest obstacle to our progress.
11:38
11 minutes, 38 seconds
And, in fact, the guy two doors down from me was often just another of their victims. The Epstein network has billions of dollars: power, connections, planes, art, homes.
11:48
11 minutes, 48 seconds
But the most important thing they have is, and I'm sorry if this sounds corny, but it's class solidarity. And the story of this network doesn't end with Epstein's death.
11:56
11 minutes, 56 seconds
The Epstein class is still entrenching themselves into all aspects of our lives, taking us to a pointless war and trying to shape the elections that will determine America's future.
12:06
12 minutes, 6 seconds
We're still living in the Epstein network's world today.
12:08
12 minutes, 8 seconds
Leon Black's son, Ben Black, who Epstein hosted a birthday party for and who Epstein hired a portrait artist for, is today in charge of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation,
12:19
12 minutes, 19 seconds
a government body established during the first Trump administration that provides loans, capital, and insurance to American corporations abroad using taxpayer dollars.
12:29
12 minutes, 29 seconds
That includes insurance for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, a focal point of the Iran War.
12:34
12 minutes, 34 seconds
Meaning a guy Epstein helped commission a painting of will decide which corporations get your tax dollars.
12:42
12 minutes, 42 seconds
As midterm elections approach, the Epstein network is plotting to seize further control of our government.
12:47
12 minutes, 47 seconds
Reid Hoffman has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to oppose progressive candidates in Democratic primaries.
He often uses donor-advised funds to make those donations, a tactic Epstein recommended to him in 2016.
13:01
13 minutes, 1 second
And it's possible we wouldn't have today's AI intrusion into our lives without Epstein.
13:07
13 minutes, 7 seconds
While I wasn't able to find any direct ties between Epstein and the heavy hitters like OpenAI or Anthropic, he did fund early AI research,
13:14
13 minutes, 14 seconds
including bankrolling the researchers who coined generative AI and AGI.
13:18
13 minutes, 18 seconds
He also made early investments in the infrastructure behind AI, like data center build-outs, that he never got to see come to fruition.
13:26
13 minutes, 26 seconds
Looking at these members of the Epstein class shows us that the conspiracy at the heart of our country's biggest problems aren't just about one man.
13:34
13 minutes, 34 seconds
It's about a network, a club of elites across every major industry,
---
GGL 4 26
AI Overview
Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in 1990 with a bachelor's degree in symbolic systems. He was affiliated with College Eight, now known as Rachel Carson College, which focuses on environmental themes and sustainability.
- College Affiliation: Hoffman was a student at College Eight during his time at UCSC.
- Renaming: College Eight was formally renamed Rachel Carson College in 2016 to honor the environmentalist author.
- Background: UCSC is known for its undergraduate research and innovative spirit, aligning with Hoffman's later work in technology.
Hoffman's time at UCSC provided a foundation in interdisciplinary studies, which he often cites as influential to his career in technology and business.
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kos 11 25 no twt
Yesterday morning, the comma-loving emotionally-stunted whiner Donald J Trump, who is a convicted felon, posted a screed that included the following:
I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many people
Apparently Reid Hoffman has had enough of the bluffing and has called Donny Boy’s hand.[bring it on]
One of these men is a genius who displays confidence and leadership. The other is President of the United States.
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context
an 11 25
George Bush speechwriter and podcaster Tim Miller says MAGA Media “is in shambles as they're trying to circle the wagons around President Donald Trump following the … Epstein revelations.”
“You know, these folks are just grasping for anything to try to defend Trump when even in the most generous interpretation of events, he had wildly inappropriate relationship with the country's most notorious child sex trafficker, was around young women and girls — apparently, according to one of the emails — that [Epstein] was sexually abusing and trafficking, and that when he got a chance to reveal and publicize the other people who were complicit in this, he decided to cover it up,” said Miller.
Miller referenced a recent “News Nation” interview between Megyn Kelly and guest Batya Ungar-Sargon where she downplayed the allegations against Epstein.
“We have not seen some slew of young women come forward to say ‘me too’ on Donald Trump molesting them or having paid for sex with them when they were barely legal or otherwise. It just hasn't happened,” Kelly told Ungar-Sargon in replayed footage.
But Miller dismantled this argument, pointing out that he himself had interviewed Epstein victim Stacey Williams who claimed to have been groped by Trump.
“Being led into Donald's office to be groped by him was bad enough, and I probably was young enough and confused enough where maybe I was still questioning [what was happening],” Williams said. Miller included a link to that interview.
“Where have you been, Megyn Kelly? There were at least 28 women have accused Donald Trump of various acts of sexual misconduct, including rape, kissing and groping without consent. ‘You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab ‘em by the p——,' looking under women's skirts, and yes, walking in on naked teenage pageant contestants,” Miller said.
Ungar-Sargon didn’t push back, on Kelly's claim, but instead pushed the argument that Epstein pushed his victims onto Trump and friend.
“[A] lawyer for a group of the women actually said Jeffrey Epstein would prey upon women when they were underage, … and then the lawyer said when they came of age and he was no longer interested in them, he would then pass them on,” Ungar-Sargon told Kelly.
“Sure,” said Miller. “… [W]hat was happening with these young girls was that Jeffrey Epstein was abusing them and molesting them. And then when they became 18, he would pass them off to his friends. And these sex-trafficked and groomed girls would give ... sexual massages to creepy old men who were friends with a sex trafficker. That's the spin now. That's where they're at. That's where MAGA world is. Here's our pretty picture that we'll paint on this.”
But Miller rolled out photos of Epstein victims Tila Davis and Jenna Lisa Jones, as well as Michelle Licata, (age 16) and Jennifer Araz.
“Araz was recruited at 14, assaulted at 15, and she looks like a baby,” said Miller, who then showed a photo of victim Courtney Wilde.
“If you're sitting across from them on this plane and then somebody looked over to you and was like, ‘he's … having sex with her,’ nobody would look at that and say, ‘well, it seems passably illegal.’ You would call the authorities immediately," Miller said.
“It's like looking at a Maxim magazine,” Miller said, referencing a photo collage of victims. “It's just sick. This is what Donald Trump has done to these people. He's made them sick in the brain. They can no longer have enough clarity … to be able to say, ‘you know what? I don't need to debase myself like this for this mushroom d——, f—— piece of s—— in the White House.’”
“We don't know exactly what Donald Trump's role was, but the fact that Donald Trump has been accused of sexual assault many, many times is on the public record,” said Miller. “The fact that he bragged about it is on the public record. The fact that he's trying to cover this up is something we all know. Who would want to cover up what happened to these girls?”
---
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an 11 25 badash
President Donald Trump is intensifying his efforts to thwart attempts to force the release of the Epstein files, even as the House moves toward a vote that could send disclosure legislation to his desk for his signature — or veto — further heightening scrutiny of his past ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
On Friday, the president announced he will ask the U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation “to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him.”
The New York Times reported that the “inquiry appeared to be retribution for the renewed focus on his own ties to Mr. Epstein.”
After White House officials reportedly held a Situation Room meeting with Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert on Wednesday to convince her — unsuccessfully — to remove her name from the discharge petition, the president on Friday took a different tack, appearing both to try to wash his hands of the entire ordeal while refocusing attention on his political opponents and others.
“Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem!” Trump railed on his Truth Social website, while attacking Democrats.
“The Democrats are doing everything in their withering power to push the Epstein Hoax again, despite the DOJ releasing 50,000 pages of documents, in order to deflect from all of their bad policies and losses, especially the SHUTDOWN EMBARRASSMENT, where their party is in total disarray, and has no idea what to do,” Trump alleged.
“Some Weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and foolish,” the president continued. “Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem!”
“Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Summers about Epstein, they know all about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a Country to run!”
Deadline on Friday noted that “Since the email release, Trump has avoided answering reporters’ questions about Epstein.”
Pointing to Trump’s Friday remarks, Politico’s Kyle Cheney remarked, “Trump again pleads with Republicans to stop talking about Epstein. The pressure hasn’t worked as well as it usually does. Also, the emails show Epstein was politically amorphous, deriding Ds just as much as Rs. And these latest emails were from the Epstein estate, not DOJ.”
Attorney Aaron Parnas added, “I guarantee you if Donald Trump truly believed Epstein was the ‘Democrat’s problem,’ he would have released all of the files by now.”
---
[
Joe Lonsdale
Ep 121: Reid Hoffman on AI Optimism & How the Democratic Party Alienated Silicon Valley
Ep 121: Reid Hoffman on AI Optimism & How the Democratic Party Alienated Silicon Valley ... Reid Hoffman is a longtime leader in Silicon Valley...
.
Jul 28, 2025](https://blog.joelonsdale.com/p/ep-121-reid-hoffman-on-ai-optimism)
121: Reid Hoffman on AI Optimism & How the Democratic Party Alienated Silicon Valley
Jul 28, 2025
Reid Hoffman is a longtime leader in Silicon Valley and vocal AI optimist; he's also a major Democratic Party donor. What happens when AI runs headfirst into labor unions and key Democratic interests? Why is Reid calling out his party for alienating Silicon Valley? And can a divided country unite around a positive AI future?
Join us for an important conversation at the intersection of technology, politics, and policy. An early member of the PayPal mafia, Reid went on to co-found LinkedIn and became a prolific investor as Partner at Greylock and Chairman of Village Global. He's also a Microsoft board member, popular podcast host, and author, most recently of “Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future."
We begin with lessons from PayPal and the unique culture that united an iconic cast of characters. Then we dive into Reid's latest book "Superagency" and his case for AI optimism. Reid's enthusiasm collides with Democratic Party strongholds, so I challenged him on how he reconciles these conflicts and whether AI can win out over special interests. Case in point: autonomous trucks. Reid's a key investor in Aurora, which is based in California but launching its first trucks in Texas. Red states are increasingly the laboratories of innovation and growth, which Reid acknowledges and admits is a major challenge that he raises with blue-state governors. Next, we discuss the six levels of the AI investment stack and where Reid is focused, plus his advice for startups amid the scale compute race. We also explore the future of social media and why Reid is creating his own AI clone. Finally, we revisit Silicon Valley's pivot to the right and why Reid is calling out the Democratic Party for prioritizing DEI and identity politics over merit and innovation.
We didn't focus the episode on our obvious political disagreements, but rather the areas where we agree: Reid is an optimist and shares that trait with a lot of my PayPal mafia friends even if he doesn't share our worldview. If we're going to accelerate our country into an optimistic AI future and lift up millions of lives -- which I hope to help achieve! -- then we need to have conversations across the aisle aimed at advancing pro-growth, freedom-oriented policies.
Subscribe
00:00 Episode intro
02:00 What made the PayPal Mafia unique?
06:38 The best arguments for AI optimism
10:59 Reid's optimism vs Democratic Party strongholds
14:15 Inflection AI & lessons for AI startups
19:53 Why Reid made an AI clone
22:54 AI tutors vs teachers unions
26:59 How Democrats alienated Silicon Valley
32:56 Pushing back on antisemitism
36:38 Advice for entrepreneurs in the AI age
---
[
MSNBC News](https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/pam-bondi-jeffrey-epstein-files-trump-fact-check-rcna236482)
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GREEN HIGHER ED? FDN DONOR
News Archive - Lever for Change
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SEE TESTIMONY OPPOS RES BONDI BIGTIME 1025 KICKASS HOFFMAN
CoMBATIVE OVERSIGHT WHITEHOUSE
ask about epstein b/c you took HIS PAL reid hoffman money 2x? 10 25
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crc is root of bs?
Reid Hoffman and Disinformation -Capital Research Center
November 15, 2021
reid Hoffman and Disinformation
Michael Watson on Newsmax
Jenn Pellegrino interviews Michael Watson on Newsmax on November 3, 2021.
November 15, 2021
Good Information is a project backed by big liberal donors, including George Soros and Reid Hoffman. Hoffman has a history of Democratic political causes and disinformation efforts, including American Emergent Technologies, which ran a fake news campaign modeled on tactics Russian government cutouts allegedly used during the 2016 presidential election. Good Information looks like another disinformation project in the Left’s war on the free speech rights of conservatives.
See also:
- “Onetime Disinformation Donors Back Left-Wing Propaganda Targeting Disinformation” by Michael Watson, October 21, 2021.
Tags: disinformation, George Soros, Good Information, Reid Hoffman
Michael is Research Director for Capital Research Center and serves as the managing editor for InfluenceWatch. A graduate of the College of William and Mary, he previously worked for a…
ref
oct 2021
on Tuesday, political media outlet Axios reported on the latest project of controversial Democratic operative Tara McGowan, best known as head of the ACRONYM network of Democratic-aligned political committees and political investment vehicles including Shadow, which created the phone-voting application that crashed during the Iowa Democratic Party presidential nominating caucuses in 2020. McGowan will head Good Information, a nominally for-profit “public benefit corporation” venture “to fund and scale businesses that cut through echo chambers with fact-based information” and “to invest in local news companies.” The venture supersedes an earlier reported effort to create a nonprofit along the same lines.
Backers
Axios’s reporting indicates that McGowan’s project will be funded by major Democratic donors including George Soros. That is not surprising, but another name said to be funding this “anti-disinformation” effort should raise eyebrows because he has supported purveyors of disinformation in the past: Reid Hoffman, billionaire founder of LinkedIn.
Since 2016, Hoffman has provided substantial funding to Democratic political causes, among them McGowan’s ACRONYM, through his Investing in US vehicle. But one of those causes should give the lie to Hoffman’s claims of concern about disinformation. Investing in US funded American Emergent Technologies, one of a handful of Democratic groups that allegedly ran a literal fake news campaign modeled on the tactics Russian government cutouts allegedly used to influence the 2016 presidential election in order to defeat a Republican candidate in an Alabama race.
While Hoffman denies having known that American Emergent Technologies was engaging in a disinformation operation, the fact that he funded a group that would consider doing such a thing should be a giant red flag against Good Information’s and McGowan’s claim that they will provide “fact-based information.”
Courier, New
As part of the creation of Good Information, the group is acquiring McGowan’s former liberal agitprop network, Courier Newsroom. Courier Newsroom was a front for ACRONYM, operating what the left-leaning OpenSecrets called “a network of websites emulating progressive local news outlets. Courier has faced scrutiny for exploiting the collapse of local journalism to spread ‘hyperlocal partisan propaganda.’” As CRC president Scott Walter described:
Courier’s Wisconsin site UpNorthNews can lightly rewrite a Democratic candidate’s press release, and then the real money kicks in as the disinfo machine advertises the fake news story across multiple social media sites, in hopes of swaying Badger State voters who assume they’re reading news, not a political ad. Tobias Hoonhout reported for National Review on a number of such efforts and found that “at least 74 percent of the group’s spending has been allocated to boosting vulnerable Democrats competing in 14 competitive House races.”
McGowan reportedly told Axios that Good Information “could make investments in entities across the political spectrum,” citing Bill Kristol’s The Bulwark, which I recently characterized as a repository of liberal cable-news-contributing former Republicans who seemingly exist solely to support whatever the liberalism of the moment demands, as “as an example of the type of center-right news outlet [Good Information] could fund.”
The Greater “Disinformation” Trojan Horse
Billionaire liberals who have backed disinformation in the past supporting a “efforts that tackle disinformation” is not new. In his piece describing how Courier false-flags national Democratic press releases as “local news,” Walter described the “Commission on Information Disorder,” the Aspen Institute project that placed PACRONYM donor Kathryn Murdoch and Katie Couric in charge of “combating America’s urgent mis- and disinformation challenge.” Couric recently admitted omitting liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s interview comments critical of Colin Kaepernick’s anti-national anthem protests.
Also targeting supposed “disinformation” is Frances Haugen, the “Facebook Whistleblower.” In fact, her campaign has all the hallmarks not of whistleblowing but of political public relations: *Politico*reported that Pierre Omidyar (a notable funder of Kristol’s network of anti-Trump and anti-conservatism advocacy groups) funded Whistleblower Aid and Center for Humane Technology, both nonprofits working with Haugen. Center for Human Technology’s public relations flack is Bill Burton, late of the Obama White House. Haugen appeared on Burton’s podcast. Larry Lessig—a Harvard academic, erstwhile Democratic politician, and critic of the legal decisions that undergird conservatives’ organized political advocacy—has provided Haugen with legal and communications work pro bono.
Taken together, it looks like McGowan, Hoffman, and Soros’s latest effort for “Good Information” over “disinformation” is yet another front in the Left’s war on conservative speech rights.
It probably is exactly what it looks like.
Tags: ACRONYM, Center for Humane Technology, Commission on Information Disorder, Courier Newsroom, disinformation, election integrity, Frances Haugen, George Soros, Good Information, Investing in US, Iowa, Kathryn Murdoch, Katie Couric, PACRONYM, Reid Hoffman, Whistleblower Aid
//
Deception & Misdirection
Transgender medical symposium showcases radical quackery
by Parker Thayer on October 7, 2025
Deception & Misdirection
The Southern Poverty Law Center is biased — and extraordinarily wealthy
by Robert Stilson on September 22, 2025
Deception & Misdirection
The top financiers of the U.S. Intifada
by Ryan Mauro on September 16, 2025
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OMFG
an 9 25
In between his highly publicized designation of Antifa as a domestic terror organization and his indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, US President Donald Trump signed a little-reported national security memorandum that gives law enforcement new tools to target his critics.
Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on Thursday. The directive, titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” focuses exclusively on “anti-fascist” or left-wing activities, and mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
“I don’t want to sound hyperbolic but the plain truth is that NSPM-7 is a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda,” journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote in a piece raising alarm about the directive on Saturday.
Klippenstein argued that the memorandum was worrying on several fronts. For one, its focus on preventing crimes before they are committed opens the door to rights violations.
“In other words, they’re targeting pre-crime, to reference Minority Report,” Klippenstein wrote.
For another, the memorandum casts a very wide net, targeting groups, individuals, funders, and “entities” and listing several protected beliefs as “indicia” of extremism.
These include:
- “Anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity;
- Support for the overthrow of the United States Government;
- Extremism on migration, race, and gender; and
- Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
What’s more, the memorandum entrusts enforcement to the FBI’s over 4,000-strong Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF), which removes the legal challenges to directing the National Guard or other military forces to quash domestic dissent.
“For the Trump White House, the beauty of using an already existing network is that it bypasses Congressional oversight and scrutiny and even obscures federal activity to governors and legislatures at the state level,” Klippenstein wrote.
The types of activities that will be targeted are also quite broad, with the document defining “organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder” as “domestic terrorist acts.”
The memorandum also targets any individual or group who might fund activity the administration deems terrorism and directs the Internal Revenue Service to “take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism,” which could be a means of threatening the status of nonprofits.
Finally, as Drop Site Newspointed out, the memo authorizes the attorney general to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations for the first time in US history.
“By targeting beliefs and protest activity, the directive positions dissent itself as a potential crime,” Drop Sitewrote.
The Trump administration’s focus on violence associated with left-wing beliefs and groups is not supported by the facts. National Institute of Justice data found that right-wing violence had led to 520 deaths since 1990 compared with 78 deaths due to left-wing violence. However, the administration removed that study from the Department of Justice website shortly after Charlie Kirk was killed, The Guardianreported earlier this month.
The administration’s efforts, while accelerated, build on processes that began during the US response to the September 11 attacks, as Klippenstein explained:
A “pre-crime” endeavor, preventing attacks before they happen, is core to the post-9/11 concept of counterterrorism itself. No longer satisfied to investigate acts of terrorism after the fact to bring terrorists to justice, the Bush administration adopted preemption. Overseas, that led to aerial assassination by drones and “special operations” kill missions. Domestically, it led to a counter-terrorism campaign whose hallmark was excessive and illegal government surveillance and the use of undercover agents and “confidential human sources” to trap (and entrap) would-be terrorists.
However, the Trump administration is expanding the War-on-Terror mandate with fewer guardrails.
“Now, with Donald Trump’s directive retooling the counter-terror apparatus to go after Americans at home, this means monitoring political activity, or speech, as an investigative method to discover ‘radicalism,‘” Klippenstein said, noting that the NSPM-7 breaks with post-Watergate national security documents by failing to mention the First Amendment rights to protest and organize.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is already eager to make use of the document.
“We are witnessing domestic terrorist sedition against the federal government,” he wrote on social media on Friday. “The JTTF has been dispatched by the Attorney General, pursuant to NSPM-7. All necessary resources will be utilized.”
In an interview with Greg Sargent for theNew Republic, Trump ally Steve Bannon confirmed that Miller and others in the administration were preparing to go after left-liberal groups and media whose criticism of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could be interpreted as “goading” on violence against the agency.
Referring to Miller’s comments that calling ICE authoritarian incited violence and terrorism, Bannon responded, “Stephen Miller is correct—more importantly he’s in charge.
The threats of investigations put liberal and left-leaning organizations in a tough place. On the one hand, they want to prepare as best they can. On the other, they do not want to obey in advance.
“Officials at these groups tell me they must strike a balance between being clear-eyed about how bad this could get while not letting it discourage political activity,” Sargent wrote. “That latter form of surrender is exactly what Trump and Miller want. And under no circumstances should anybody willingly hand it over to them.”
---
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GAI’s Seamus Bruner Reveals Left-Wing Funders Such as Roy Singham Behind Antifa Riots
PIX PEACE SIGN Elizabeth Weibel9 Oct 2025
Seamus Bruner, the Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) revealed that left-wing funders such as billionaire Neville Roy Singham were behind left-wing Antifa riots and protests.
During a roundtable event on Antifa with President Donald Trump, Bruner explained that he, GAI President Peter Schweizer, and their team “followed” a trail of money and “followed it to the top of what” they called the Protest Industrial Complex, or Riot Inc. Bruner explained that the so-called “Riot Inc.” was made up of many different divisions, and that “dozens of radical organizations” have received millions of dollars from Riot Inc.
“We found a network of NGOs, it’s not just the Soros network, the Open Society Network. It’s other funding networks, the Arabella Funding Network, the Tides Funding Network, Neville Roy Singham and his network, foreign cash,” Bruner explained. “And, it’s also big left-wing funders — some of them are not citizens of this country.”
Bruner continued to note that these left-wing funders were “pouring money into this entire ecosystem.”
Bruner continued to share “three money facts” about Riot Inc., explaining that there were “many divisions” such as “PR divisions, marketing divisions” and even a “well-funded legal division.”
“Number two, we have identified dozens of radical organizations, not just the decentralized Antifa organizations, but dozens of radical organizations that have received more than one hundred million dollars from the Riot Inc. investors,” Bruner added. “These would be the lawyer groups, these would be the groups that advocate for calling good, honest Americans fascists.”
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“And then, three, I think the most shocking thing is that we have found that more than one hundred million dollars in U.S. taxpayer funding has flowed into these funding networks, including at least four million dollars to these very groups themselves,” Bruner added.
Bruner’s mention of Singham comes after an investigation by the Breitbart News Foundation reported that while “records from the United Kingdom confirm” that Singham resigned from Thoughtworks, Inc., which he founded in 1993, “Chinese government records suggest otherwise.”
After founding Thoughtworks, Inc. in 1993 and building the company into a software consulting powerhouse, Singham helped orchestrate its sale in October 2017, for approximately $785 million to a group of funds managed by London-based private equity firm Apax Partners. Corporate records from the United Kingdom confirm Singham’s resignation from Thoughtworks the same month, and his own LinkedIn profile says he has been retired since 2017. Thoughtworks’ English-language website relegates him to its “alumni” section, reinforcing the image of a clean break.
But Chinese government records suggest otherwise. These records list Singham as a corporate officer of Thoughtworks’ Chinese subsidiary, Thoughtworks Beijing, as recently as June 17, 2025, and for at least as far back as 2022. These records are from the National Enterprise Credit Reporting System (NECIPS), China’s corporate registry. Other documents, including trade show profile and “help-wanted” ads, listed Singham as Thoughtworks Beijing’s official contact in 2021.
The New York Post reported in June that Singham was set to be called to testify before a congressional committee regarding him funding “radical anti-Israel and Marxist groups” behind the Los Angeles riots.
In an article written by Bruner in June, Bruner detailed how the GAI had uncovered how the “official partners” behind the “No Kings” protests “bagged $114.8 million since 2019 from the Arabella Avisors dark money network an how professional protest organizations use tax dollars as a force multiplier.”
Bruner reported:
The expected worldwide mobilization of protests against President Donald Trump this weekend will hardly be a spontaneous eruption. On the contrary, the tumult is a carefully plotted production organized by The Indivisible Project and financed by the progress dark money network managed/advised by Arabella Advisors, which has perfected the mounting of made-to-order protests. Since 2019, the Arabella network has dumped more than $100 million into the coffers of the official “No Kings” protest partners—including the creator of the official protest song book.
This “grassroots” “nationwide days of defiance” targets Trump and his “billionaire allies,” according to organizers. The Arabella network’s biggest benefactors are the left’s own billionaire heroes, including George Soros, Bill Gates, Hansjorg Wyss, Mark Zuckerberg, and Reid Hoffman.
During the roundtable event, Bruner vowed to “keep following the money,” and expressed that he appreciated “everything” Trump was doing.
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ggl 10 25
AI Overview
An allegation made during an October 2025 Senate hearing by Attorney General Pam Bondi that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse received campaign donations from tech billionaire Reid Hoffman is "simply not true," according to Whitehouse
. Federal campaign finance records support Whitehouse's denial.
The October 2025 hearing
- The accusation: During a Senate hearing where she was being questioned by Whitehouse, Bondi accused him of taking campaign money from Hoffman, a major Democratic donor. Bondi characterized Hoffman as "one of Epstein's closest confidants," a reference to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Hoffman has said his interactions with Epstein were limited to fundraising for MIT and he regrets his association with him.
- Whitehouse's denial: Whitehouse immediately rejected Bondi's claim. He later stated that he checked campaign finance records and confirmed that "nobody by the name of Reid (or Reed) Hoffman has donated to any of my campaigns—not in 2018, not in 2024, not ever".
- Bondi's motive: Critics say Bondi's accusation was an attempt to deflect from questions Whitehouse was asking about alleged wrongdoing within the Department of Justice under the Trump administration.
Hoffman's political donations
While Hoffman did not donate to Whitehouse, he is a major donor to Democrats and has contributed heavily to various national campaigns and political action committees (PACs).
- Recent contributions: In the 2024 election cycle, Hoffman gave millions of dollars to Democratic super PACs, such as Future Forward.
- Recent political endorsement: Following Joe Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, Hoffman endorsed Kamala Harris's campaign.
- Wider political concerns: Following the 2024 election, Hoffman reportedly expressed concerns about potential political retribution and was considering moving overseas.
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Opinion
Photographer Captures Pam Bondi’s Notes—and They’re a Doozy
Edith Olmsted
Wed, October 8, 2025
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi needed a cheat sheet of attacks to dodge Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s tough questions.
While sitting before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, Bondi repeatedly refused to answer questions from the Rhode Island Democrat about what happened to the $50,000 cash bribe border czar Tom Homan received from undercover FBI agents in 2024.
Reuters photographer Jonathan Ernst captured an image of the inside of a folder of notes Bondi referred to during questioning by Whitehouse. But her notes had nothing to do with her work as leader of the Department of Justice, or even the embattled border czar. Rather, Bondi had collected screenshots of social media posts, prewritten comebacks, and handwritten notes she hoped could give her a good “gotcha” moment.
The top of the folder showed a July X post from Whitehouse in which he’d called for an investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. “No government official should be above the law,” he wrote.
Also included in the folder was a bulleted list of comebacks. Apparently, Bondi needed to prepare the remark “You are a total hypocrite” in advance.
Screenshot of a tweet
She employed another one of her prewritten attacks when asked about Homan’s tax returns. “Senator, I would be more concerned if I were you when you talk about corruption and money, when you pushed for legislation that subsidized your wife’s company!” Bondi sneered.
“The questions here are actually pretty specific,” Whitehouse replied, undeterred. “So, having you respond with completely irrelevant far-right internet talking points is really not very helpful here.”
Below her catalog of clapbacks, Bondi had written a handwritten note “On Epstein” positing whether Whitehouse had ever accepted money from Reid Hoffman, who once invited Epstein to dinner. She used the tidbit to deflect from a question about whether the FBI had seized photos of President Donald Trump with half-naked young women from the safe at Epstein’s estate, as reported by author Michael Wolff.
“Do you know if the FBI found those photographs in their search of Jeffrey Epstein’s safe or premises or otherwise? Have you seen any such thing?” Whitehouse asked.
“You know, Senator Whitehouse, you sit here and make salacious remarks, once again trying to slander President Trump left and right, when you’re the one who was taking money from one of Epstein’s closest confidants, Reid Hoffman,” Bondi replied.
Again, Whitehouse continued unbothered. “The question is, did the FBI find those photographs that have been discussed publicly by a witness who claimed Jeffrey Epstein showed them to him. You don’t know anything about that?” he asked, and Bondi fell silent, having exhausted her scant notes.
It’s disturbing, but not surprising, that Bondi didn’t make actual preparations to answer tough questions from senators. It appears that the attorney general felt no obligation to be accountable to the American people about alleged efforts to cover up for Trump or his underlings, believing them all to be above the law.
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June 3, 2021
A leftwing initiative launched this week aimed at monitoring conservative "disinformation" has ties to a progressive billionaire linked to several of the sort of disinformation projects he is now trying to combat.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman’s investment fund donated an undisclosed amount to Indivisible, an advocacy group launching the new effort to track conservative disinformation. The fund, Investing in US, has also financed a group that created fake social media personas to suppress Republican voter turnout in Alabama's 2017 special Senate election. Indivisible thinks its "Truth Brigade" can help flag misinformation better than social media algorithms, according to Forbes.
Social media platforms have increased their efforts to contain "disinformation" in recent months, often with mixed results. Until recently, Facebook flagged posts claiming the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab, even as the theory gained traction in the scientific community. LinkedIn, the only American social network in China, recently censored a China critic based in the United Kingdom who referred to the Chinese government as an "oppressive dictatorship."
Critics say Hoffman’s involvement casts doubt on the Truth Brigade’s ability to effectively police disinformation. "A man who invests in social media projects aimed at hardball political disinformation is not one whose allies can be trusted," said Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, which tracks liberal dark money groups.
The Alabama special election wasn’t Hoffman’s only run-in with disinformation. Facebook investigated whether a Hoffman-backed initiative called News for Democracy published misleading information targeting Republican voters during the 2018 election.
The New York Times reported in 2017 that Hoffman was a major donor to Indivisible, which was founded in 2016 by two former congressional staffers. Dmitri Mehlhorn, Hoffman’s partner at Investing in US, identified Indivisible as one of the company’s grantees in a December 2018 post on Medium. Mehlhorn did not disclose how much funding went to Indivisible.
In 2017, Indivisible members registered as Republicans in a Utah congressional primary in order to boost a moderate candidate to replace outgoing representative Jason Chaffetz.
Indivisible press secretary Emily Phelps told the Washington Free Beacon the group has not received funding from Hoffman since 2019, and that he "doesn't have any connection" to the work of the Truth Brigade. Investing in US did not respond to a request for comment.
While Indivisible bills itself as a grassroots organization, its donors are among the wealthiest supporters of the progressive movement. In addition to Hoffman, organizations directed by billionaire financier George Soros and the late banking magnate Herb Sandler have given millions to Indivisible.
Soros’s Open Society Foundations gave $2.6 million to Indivisible from 2017 to 2019. Democracy PAC, which was formed by Soros, gave $500,000 last year to Indivisible’s political action committee, Indivisible Action. Strategic Victory Fund, a super PAC formed by the Soros-backed Democracy Alliance, contributed $150,000 to Indivisible Action last year.
The Sandler Foundation gave $2.25 million in 2018 and 2019 to Indivisible Civic Engagement, an offshoot of Indivisible.
Walter questions whether Indivisible is forming the Truth Brigade to fight disinformation, or as a fundraising ploy.
"If you are these people you want thousands of folks regularly interacting with you. That’s a great way to fundraise," said Walter, whose watchdog group published a report on Indivisible in 2018.
Indivisible is no stranger to political controversy. The group also supported defunding police departments and packing the Supreme Court. It has partnered with the Women’s March, the left-wing resistance group whose leaders have a long history of anti-Semitism.
Published under: Facebook , George Soros , Open Society Foundations , Social Media
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dem dock 9 25
Trump signed a memorandum Thursday directing the federal government to investigate and dismantle “domestic terrorism networks.”
The move appears targeted at left-leaning progressive nonprofit groups, which Trump days ago vowed to dismantle, falsely claiming they fund and support political violence and terrorism in the U.S.
The memo directs the FBI’s National Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to go after “anti-fascist” movements in the U.S.
“This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties,” the memo reads.
Trump signed the memo shortly after the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice directed several U.S. attorneys offices across the country to open investigations into the Open Society Foundations, a progressive grant network founded by Democratic megadonor George Soros.
Asked what specific people or organizations the memo seeks to target, Trump named Soros, who Republicans have long claimed without evidence funds violent protests in the U.S.
“Soros is a name certainly that I keep hearing,” Trump said. “I don’t know. Soros is a name that I hear.”
Trump earlier this month asserted Soros must be “jailed” because “he’s a bad guy,” while Vice President JD Vance baselessly claimed that Soros and the Open Society Foundations pay “the salaries of terrorist sympathizers” and “promote violence and terrorism.”
The Open Society Foundations in a statement to Democracy Docket said the Trump administration’s “accusations are politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the First Amendment right to free speech.
“When power is abused to take away the rights of some people, it puts the rights of all people at risk,” it added.
“The Open Society Foundations unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism. Our activities are peaceful and lawful, and our grantees are expected to abide by human rights principles and comply with the law.”
“Our work in the United States is solely dedicated to strengthening democracy and upholding constitutional freedoms. We stand by the work we do to improve lives in the United States and across the world.”
Trump also named LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, one of the largest donors to the Democratic Party. Hoffman founded the Aphorism Foundation, a California-based private grantmaking group that focuses on noncontroversial causes such as supporting universities and hospitals.
Through a separate nonprofit, Hoffman provided financial support for writer E. Jean Carroll’s sexual assault lawsuit against Trump.
In terms of specific actions, Thursday’s memo ordered the commissioner of the IRS “to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism.”
“In addition, where applicable, the Commissioner shall ensure that the [IRS] refers such organizations, and the employees and officers of such organizations, to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution,” the memo reads.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has repeatedly threatened to strip left-leaning organizations of their tax exemptions.
Federal law bars senior executive branch officials from directing the IRS, which is currently headed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in an acting capacity, to audit any taxpayer or nonprofit organization.
However, the Trump administration could create pretext triggering an IRS audit through several different means.
The White House has repeatedly attempted to link the recent murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to progressive causes and groups. The effort has heightened fears that Trump and his allies seek to exploit the killing to further attack institutions that power the political left.
The Trump administration has also specifically targeted the Ford Foundation, another progressive philanthropic organization.
Earlier this week, Trump signed a separate memo claiming to designate “antifa,” a leaderless and decentralized anti-fascist movement, as a “domestic terrorist organization.”
Trump and many of his fellow Republicans have long used antifa as a catch-all designation against protests or speech they disapprove of.
Senior White House officials Thursday claimed that large-scale nationwide protests in recent years, such as the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, were organized by unspecified organizations and amounted to terrorism.
“This is the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism, to dismantle antifa, to dismantle the organizations that have been carrying out these acts of political violence and terrorism,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s homeland security advisor, said as the president signed the memo.
*“Whether it be going back to the riots that started with Black Lives Matter and all the way through to the antifa riots, the attacks on [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers, the doxing campaign and now the political assassinations, these are not lone isolated events,” Miller added. “This is part of an organized campaign of radical left terrorism.”
Miller recently referred to the Democratic Party as “not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”
*This breaking news story has been updated with additional details throughout.
Next Up
DOJ Obeys Trump, Indicts Comey Days After Order to Pursue President’s Foes
Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted on two criminal counts days after President Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue his perceived enemies more aggressively.
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GUK 9 25
Trump issued a presidential memorandum on Thursday aimed at reining in what he has called a radical leftwing domestic “terror network” but which seemed likely to meet fierce legal pushback from critics depicting it as a licence for a broad crackdown on his political opponents.
Prompted by journalists, Trump suggested that George Soros, the billionaire Hungarian-born philanthropist who funds the Open Society Foundations, could be in his sights. He also identified Reid Hoffman, a billionaire venture capitalist, adding: “I hear about him. Maybe it could be him. It could be a lot of people.”
Earlier, the Open Society Foundations had hit back at reports that the justice department was planning to target the group and criticized the Trump administration for “politically motivated attacks on civil society”.
Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a statement: “After one of the most harrowing weeks for our first amendment rights, the president is invoking political violence, which we all condemn, as an excuse to target non-profits and activists with the false and stigmatizing label of ‘domestic terrorism’. This is a shameful and dangerous move.”
At a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, the memorandum was presented as aimed at “establishing a comprehensive strategy to investigate, disrupt and dismantle all stages of organized political violence and domestic terrorism”.
It was said to be part of an administration-wide response that would include the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforces, the Department of Justice and the Department of Treasury.
The ACLU said in a statement that joint terrorism task forces “already have a long history of investigations that wrongly target protestors, communities of color, and those engaged in dissent”.
Surrounded by members of his cabinet, Trump said the goal was to target “the funders of a lot of these groups”, some of whom he claimed to know. But he was vague when asked which groups he meant or who the funders were.
“These are anarchists and agitators, professional anarchists and agitators, and they get hired by wealthy people, some of whom I know, I guess, probably know,” he said. “You wouldn’t know at dinner with them. Everything’s nice, and then you find out that they funded millions of dollars to these lunatics.”
Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School and former federal prosecutor, said the memorandum itself probably doesn’t carry much legal weight. “You can’t by executive order create new crimes. This does not create new crimes. This says you will use the Terrorism Task Force to go after things they would usually go after,” Richman said.
But, he added: “The concern is that this administration has made clear it is only interested in pursuing politically oriented terrorism that disagrees with its political agenda.”
The Trump administration does not need to create new crimes in order to do this, he said. Laws already on the books “have and continue to provide the ability to go after ideological opponents”.
Though the memorandum may not hold up in court, “I fear how far they are going to take this,” said Jason Charter, a former activist who faced charges during Trump’s first term in connection with efforts to tear down the Andrew Jackson statue in front of the White House. “Antifa is antifascism, and antifascism is a very widely shared thing, and being against fascism should not be illegal.”
“It’s trying to slap terrorism charges on people doing protected activities under the Bill of Rights,” Charter said.
The memorandum comes amid a rightwing clamor for retribution in the wake of the 10 September murder of the far-right pundit Charlie Kirk, which Trump and his supporters have blamed on an organized leftwing network, despite early indications that the suspect acted alone.
It also followed Wednesday’s deadly attack on a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in Dallas that killed one detainee and injured two others. One of the bullets used in the attack was inscribed with the message “anti-Ice”.
The memorandum lumps together a series of apparently unrelated episodes, including a foiled 2022 assassination attempt on the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, the murder of the CEO of United Healthcare in Manhattan last December, last year’s two failed attempts on Trump’s life, and unrest on the streets of Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.
Stephen Miller, the influential White House deputy chief of staff – who has been vocal in the administration’s previous calls for a crackdown – called the initiative “historical and significant”.
“This is the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle leftwing terrorism, to dismantle antifa, to dismantle the organizations that have been carrying out these acts of political violence and terrorism,” Miller said. The joint terrorism taskforce, a unit inside the FBI, would be “the hub” of the effort, he added.
He said “an entire system of feeder organisations” were funding “harassment, doxing, intimidation and, ultimately, attempted assassinations” of public officials.
“It is all carefully planned, executed and thought through,” said Miller. “It is terrorism on our soil. We are going to use the entire force of the federal government to uproot these organizations, root and branch.”
Trump and his allies have portrayed political violence as a phenomenon primarily associated with the left, overlooking recent incidents in which Democrats have been targeted by people who are believed to be rightwing extremists or incidents in which the perpetrator’s motives are unclear.
Postingon his Truth Social network on Wednesday, Trump clearly tied the Ice facility attack to the Democrats and their criticism of his immigration crackdown in a manner resembling his response to Kirk’s killing.
“This violence is the result of the radical left Democrats constantly demonizing law enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to “Nazis,” he wrote. “The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, must be stopped. ICE Officers, and other Brave Members of Law Enforcement, are under grave threat.”
But authorities on Thursday said that they did not find evidence that the suspect was a member of “any specific group or entity, nor did he mention any specific government agency other than Ice”.
In the wake of Kirk’s killing, Trump issued an executive order designating antifa, a loose network of groups that has been involved in confrontations with the far right, as a “domestic terrorist organization”.
The new memorandum states: “This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.
“A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies – including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them – is required.”
“Intimidation tactics against those standing up for human rights and civil liberties are sadly not new in the history of this country,” Shamsi, the director of the ACLU’s national security project, said. “In an earlier era, civil rights movement leaders were also labeled security threats and investigated, monitored, threatened, and even arrested.”
*Lauren Gambino contributed reporting
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November 13, 2024 edition of *War Room: Battleground
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Weissmann, you were on TV with MSNBC and all the producers at MSNBC, preserve your documents. Ari Melber and all you hosts, preserve your documents. All of it. You better be worried and you better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, better call mom and dad tonight — hey mom and dad, you know a good lawyer? Lawyer up. Lawyer up.
You tried to destroy Trump, you tried to imprison Trump, you tried to break Trump. He’s not breakable. You couldn’t destroy him and now he is turned on you and he’s put a firebrand in charge of main justice, Department of Justice. And you’re going to have to live it with — Andrew Weissmann and all your kind — McCabe and Comey. Oh my lord.
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The hunted now become the hunters, yep. With the full apparatus — but here’s the difference, here’s the difference, here’s the difference.
It’s going to be totally transparent. It’s going to start with the mass declassification of all this information we've been keeping back from the American people, shouldn’t keep it back.
American people should understand that, should see it, and see what you’ve done. It’s going to be fully transparent, all of it, and all of the interconnections. Norm Eisen and all these NGOs, and you know, and Reid Hoffman is all worried. You better be worried. You big billionaire donors, you better be worried. You better lawyer up. You should be worried.
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ny CNN 7 24
The Bay Area has long been, and remains, a hippie-dippie bastion of Democrats who voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But there’s a small, powerful sect of Silicon Valley billionaires who are carving a path for the maybe-Trumpers and the MAGA-curious in the tech world.
Elon Musk explicitly endorsed Trump over the weekend and, according to The Wall Street Journal, inked a nine-figure donation promise to a new pro-Trump political action committee called America PAC. David Sacks, the billionaire tech investor, co-hosted a fundraiser last month at his San Francisco home and spoke at the Republican National Convention on Monday. Other contributors to America PAC include the Winklevoss twins, Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
In the last election cycle, the few Trump backers who existed in the Valley largely kept their support under the radar. Their numbers are still small, but they’re no longer hiding, and their wallets are open.
So, what’s gotten into these guys?
For one, there might not be as many Trump supporters in the tech world as you might think.
“A mythology has been marketed by partisans suggesting a non-existent surge of tech titans abandoning the Democratic party support in a rush to support the Trump/Vance campaign. The truth is that most leading tech figures do not support Trump/Vance and those prominent ones who do, were there years ago as well,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, told CNN.
And for the ones you might have heard of, most likely, it’s not a sudden fervor for the far right’s Christian extremism or a predilection for red baseball caps. Instead, they’re looking out for the bottom line.
The two biggest pain points for people in tech have been the Biden administration’s record on antitrust enforcement and its attitude toward crypto, Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a center-left tech policy group, told me.
“I don’t think it has as much to do with Trump per se,” he said. “I think they would have probably stayed with Biden if they felt more care and attention was being paid to the innovation economy.”
In other words: It’s not that the billionaires love Trump, it’s that they really don’t like Lina Khan, President Joe Biden’s top antitrust crusader; or Gary Gensler, the Wall Street cop who’s made no secret of his hostility toward digital assets.
Lina Khan, the FTC chair, has led an aggressive antitrust campaign, specifically targeting Big Tech.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
In recent years, Khan has spearheaded lawsuits against Amazon, Microsoft and Meta. In an interview with CNN last year, Khan described those efforts as part of a broader campaign to bring more of the government’s resources to bear on the daily economic problems of ordinary Americans.
But government regulation, however well intentioned, rarely sits well with the people who are getting rich off the status quo.
Two of the most famous venture capitalists in the Valley, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, have committed to donating to America PAC, according to several news outlets.
The pair haven’t exactly been hiding their frustration with the Biden administration, either.
“The American government is now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be,” they wrote in a recent blog post, which cited regulatory agencies using “brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries.” They also lamented the Biden administration’s proposed tax on unrealized capital gains, which they said would “absolutely kill” startups and the venture capital industry.
One person familiar with their plans told the Financial Times that their pivot to Trump was because “there is so much at stake on the crypto side” and the growth of artificial intelligence. “It doesn’t mean support for (Trump’s) views on immigration,” the person told the paper.
Historically, Trump hasn’t shown a lot of love for tech bros, whose social media companies he long accused of having anti-conservative bias, especially after several of them suspended his accounts in response to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the recent influx of tech money — facilitated in part by his 39-year-old venture-capitalist VP pick — appears to have softened some of Trump’s Luddite-ish views.
As recently as 2021, he called bitcoin a “scam against the dollar.” Lately, though, he’s positioning himself as the crypto-friendly candidate. While his campaign hasn’t laid out specific policy proposals around digital assets, it began accepting crypto donations this spring, and Trump is scheduled to speak at a national bitcoin conference next week.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, is working to mend ties with industry leaders who say they’ve been stymied by the SEC and Gensler, generally agreed to be the crypto community’s Voldemort.
To be sure, plenty of Big Tech dollars are still flowing to Biden and down-ballot Democrats from tech-world donors, including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Google co-founder Eric Schmidt. But Trump’s gains from Silicon Valley have come just as some major Democratic donors have hit pause amid conversations about replacing the president on the ballot.
And, as Kovacevich notes, just because there are a few big names turning toward Trump, “they’re not speaking for everybody.”
“In fact, most of the big company CEOs aren’t terribly involved in partisan politics,” Kovacevich says. “They’re going to have to work with whoever wins the election.”
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In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election, the theme of American plutocrats preparing for the apocalypse was impossible to avoid. The week after the inauguration, the New Yorker ran another piece about the super-rich who were making preparations for a grand civilisational crackup; speaking of New Zealand as a “favored refuge in the event of a cataclysm”, billionaire LinkedIn founderReid Hoffman, a former colleague of Thiel’s at PayPal, claimed that “saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more”.
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That time Democrats secretly used Russian social media tactics
The Democratic Party may be furious about the tactics' possible impact on democracy, but they aren't above using them.
Remember those dubious Twitter and Facebook tactics the Russians reportedly employed to influence the United States’ 2016 election? You know, the ones that Democrats have been railing against for a couple of years. Turns out that the Democratic Party may be furious about their possible impact on American democracy, but isn’t above using them.
According to The New York Times, “a group of Democratic tech experts” mimicked Russia’s social media tactics in the infamous 2017 Alabama senate race between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones. Jones ultimately beat accused sex offender Moore by a narrow margin, earning Democrats another seat in the Senate.
Just a year after the Alabama special election, a secret project which, according to one of the participants, aimed at garnering a better understanding of Russian methods, has come to light. As reported by the Times:
An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”
The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.
“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says. …
The project had a budget of just $100,000, in a race that cost approximately $51 million, including the primaries, according to Federal Election Commission records. … Despite its small size, the Alabama project brought together some prominent names in the world of political technology. The funding came from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who has sought to help Democrats catch up with Republicans in their use of online technology.
The money passed through American Engagement Technologies, run by Mikey Dickerson, the founding director of the United States Digital Service, which was created during the Obama administration to try to upgrade the federal government’s use of technology. Sara K. Hudson, a former Justice Department fellow now with Investing in Us, a tech finance company partly funded by Mr. Hoffman, worked on the project, along with [Jonathon Morgan, the chief executive of the cyber security firm New Knowledge].
Due to the limited scope of the effort, it’s considered highly unlikely it had a significant impact on the 2017 election. However, as the Times’ piece points out, the cause for concern lies in whether future U.S. elections will be determined by questionable tactics such as these. The Alabama incident illustrates that it’s not just foreign entities that are invested in stacking the odds in favor of their interests. As Republican consultant Dan Bayens put it, “You’ve got Russia, which showed folks how to do it, you’ve got consultants willing to engage in this type of behavior and political leaders who apparently find it futile to stop it.”
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big sticking point at the climate talks will be money _ how much rich countries should invest help poor countries cope with climate change, how much should be invested in renewable energy, and how much traditional oil and gas producers stand to lose if countries agree to forever reduce emissions.
The new initiative is twofold: a public-private project called Mission Innovation, led by governments, and the Gates-led investor group called the Breakthrough Energy Initiative.
The governments pledge to double their spending on low or no-carbon energy over the next five years, according to Brian Deese, senior adviser to Obama on climate and energy issues. They include leading energy producers and consumers, such as the U.S. China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Canada, France and Norway. They currently invest about $10 billion a year total, about half of which comes from the U.S., Deese told reporters in Washington.
Gates committed $1 billion of his money and was the “intellectual architect” behind the effort to get investors involved, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said. The business leaders are making their pledges conditional on governments also pledging more money, said a former U.S. government official who is familiar with the plan.
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- Big-name technology titans from different ideological backgrounds are backing a super PAC formed by Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig to reform the nation's campaign finance laws.
The Mayday PAC, launched on May 1, announced a crowd funding plan to raise $12 million to back supporters of publicly financed elections in 2014. If people help raise $1 million, with contributions of $10,000 or less, in one month, Lessig said wealthy supporters would kick in another $1 million. The group raised its first $1 million by the middle of May.
The big supporters providing the matching $1 million include LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman,venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder and president of Thiel Capital Peter Thiel, TED curator Chris Anderson, Union Square Ventures partners Brad Burnham and Fred Wilson, Women's Entrepreneurial Festival co-founder Joanne Wilson, and Schooner Capital founder Vin Ryan.
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5/30/14 kpfa twitter tax, campos vs other dave; slam mailler on sherriff
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...This sentiment was voiced recently by Reed Hastings, the chief ofNetflix and a director for Facebook and Microsoft. Speaking at the Stanford Directors’ College, a yearly retreat where public company directors learn the art of being a director, he reportedly cast skepticism on the traditional board model.
According to Kevin M. LaCroix of the D&O Diary, “Hastings said several times that for the board of a large publicly traded company ‘the fundamental job is to replace and compensate the C.E.O.’ Where the company has the resources to hire outside consultants as needed, it is not the board’s role to offer counsel or advice.”
After resistance from the audience during questioning, Mr. LaCroix reported, Mr. Hastings backpedaled, stating that his remarks applied only to “the largest public companies” or “special situations” where a board was required to act. (Mr. Hastings did not respond to requests made through Netflix for a comment.)
Such a sentiment is at odds with what corporate governance advocates and others suggest for boards. Today, boards are expected to be actively involved in supervising executives and participating in major decisions affecting the company. This represents a revolution from the 1970s, when the chief executive ruled, directors were often cronies of the chief and boards were extremely deferential.
Mr. Hastings’s attitude can be found elsewhere among Silicon Valley’s new elite. When Mr. Zuckerberg negotiated to acquire Instagram for $1 billion, he reportedly told his board only about 24 hours before the deal was approved, appearing to present it as a fait accompli.
Even if these boards did feel free to challenge these founders, they are tight and interlocking. Two of the directors of Netflix sit on the board of LinkedIn. Reid Hoffman, the chairman and co-founder of LinkedIn, sits on the board of Zynga, which has a director who is a partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and sits on the boards of Klout and Amazon.com. Mr. Hastings is joined on the board of Facebook by Marc Andreessen, one of the biggest deal makers in Silicon Valley who sits on the board of eBay. And so on.