US & NATO have 12x Russia's defense budget, yet Russia produces 3x the artillery munitions vital for the Ukraine war. How is America so easily outpaced by Russia, which has a fraction of our economy & defense spending? It's partially a story of corporate consolidation 🧵 155mm artillery casings are made at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, which was converted during the Korean war. The plant was acquired by General Dynamics in 2006 during a mergers & acquisition spree, w/ GD buying other artillery munition firms to nearly corner the market.

U.S. foreign aid money is flowing into Ukraine to fund a network of anti-disinfo watchdogs and journalists, who are helping the government demonize opponents, pass censorship laws, and smear pro-peace Americans as Russian agents. New investigation🧵 USAID funded Ukrainian media are helping Facebook remove alleged Russian disinfo content. The same groups, without evidence, claim Americans favoring a diplomatic solution to the conflict — Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Glenn Greenwald, etc — are Russian propaganda agents

DHS official Brian Murphy was in the news for building dossiers of critical journalists. Now he’s helping British AI firm Logically into the U.S. to identify “problematic” 2024 election narratives to scrub social media. I have a new investigation into the censorship firm: Logically AI scans social media for “misinfo” like many orgs. Unlike others, they partner w/ Meta, anything they flag is automatically shadowbanned or factchecked. They operate a news-style website and are testing generative AI for bots that attack alleged misinfo posts.

I talked previously to several lawmakers in Congress who explained that devotion to Israel -- including U.S. weapons and money -- is part of their religious belief, grounded in the Bible. This dynamic separates Israel-Palestine from a lot of other geopolitical concerns. Also interviewed Robert Jeffress, the megachurch pastor who gave the official opening prayer moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He advises American politicians, says support for Israel is critical for bringing an end times final war, Jesus returning to slay non-believers.

Ibram Kendi’s anti-racist institute at Boston University promised scholarship and data, but produced virtually nothing. Now they’re laying everyone off.

“It’s pretty hard for me to imagine they blew through $30 million in 2 years,” said one scholar.
dailyfreepress.com/2023/09/21/ami… Kendi’s contribution to the discourse is the toxic and poorly argued idea, articulated in “How to be an Antiracist,” that *every* racial disparity is inherently the byproduct of racism. He just laid off his black workforce, doesn’t that make him a racist, given the disparity?

1. TWITTER FILES - Saudi Arabia

Twitter Minimized Saudi Spy Infiltration, New Emails Show
Exclusive emails show Twitter executives downplayed the significance of a Saudi spy network operating within the company, an infiltration that allegedly led to the torture of dissidents. 2. After the Arab Spring brought unprecedented protest and public criticism of the Saudi Kingdom, the gov began a crackdown on social media.

The effort focused on Twitter, which is hugely popular in Saudi Arabia. SMAAT, a social media PR firm, helped bribe Twitter employees.

New court filings show Del. Stacey Plaskett, D-VI, one the most popular Democrats on MSNBC, not only lied about her years-long fundraising from Jeffrey Epstein… she also literally worked for Epstein’s shadowy tax and political influence fixer before entering public office. Plaskett's LinkedIn shows a two-year gap before entering Congress, from 2013-2014. Those years, Plaskett worked for Erika Kellerhals, Epstein's tax attorney and adviser who helped steer tax credits, political influence, and charitable donations for the powerful pedophile.

The FBI is hounding vegan activists as a domestic terror threat.

In an exclusive memo I am publishing, the FBI lied to depict vegan activists as a bioterror threat. The agency also raided shelters & attempted to recruit an informant to sell illegal guns to the activists. The FBI's bioterror warning is based entirely on press accounts of vegan activists "rescuing" chickens from farms. The agency claims they took no biosafety precautions -- but the pictures, video, and press accounts show the opposite, that they wore gloves & full-body gowns.

That anime cartoon avi anon in your DM group could actually be a spy.

I have a new investigation of "threat intel" firms -- contractors hired by corporations and the gov, including the FBI, to infiltrate private forums on sites like Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp & Telegram.

🧵 I talked to leading firms in the industry, including ZeroFox, DarkOwl, Searchlight Cyber, Flashpoint, & CyberInt. Several firms told me they create online personas that spend years building credibility & contacts to gain access to invite-only chat groups.

I have a friend in SF whose home under renovation construction has been burglarized *eight* times recently — they steal tools, appliances, washer dryer, etc. Cops literally won’t do anything. He has video footage of perps, who work in teams w getaway car. Police shrug it off. It’s insane. A huge break in happens, he calls police, they never come. Happens again a few times, they reply many days late. On the 8th time yesterday a few officers show up and say they can’t do anything. Security cam footage looks like one of the perps might have had a gun.

Here is my first Substack story. Mehdi Hasan claimed Taibbi “deliberately & under oath misrepresented” the facts about the DHS/CISA's work w/content moderation org EIP. That's a serious charge, one that I debunk with new Twitter Files emails & other docs. leefang.substack.com/p/msnbcs-mehdi… Mehdi claimed Taibbi lied under oath to Congress - a felony that can be prosecuted with prison - by claiming CISA worked with EIP on content moderation. Mehdi says the truth is that only a private sector org w/ a similar acronym, CIS, worked w/EIP. Mehdi is wrong and here's how.

1. New piece from the TWITTER FILES.
How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy.

The push included direct pressure from Pfizer partner BioNTech to censor activists demanding low-cost generic vaccines for low-income countries. 2. In 2020, it was clear that the pandemic would require rapid innovation. Early on, there was a push to make the solution equitable: an international partnership to share ideas, technology, new forms of medicine to rapidly solve this crisis. medicinespatentpool.org/news-publicati…

1. TWITTER FILES PART 8

*How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online PsyOp Campaign*

Despite promises to shut down covert state-run propaganda networks, Twitter docs show that the social media giant directly assisted the U.S. military’s influence operations. 2. Twitter has claimed for years that they make concerted efforts to detect & thwart gov-backed platform manipulation. Here is Twitter testifying to Congress about its pledge to rapidly identify and shut down all state-backed covert information operations & deceptive propaganda.

Docs show Facebook and Twitter closely collaborating w/ Dept of Homeland Security, FBI to police “disinfo.” Plans to expand censorship on topics like withdrawal from Afghanistan, origins of COVID, info that undermines trust in financial institutions. interc.pt/3Dq6TDB FBI agent Laura Dehmlow was in communications w Facebook that led to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 over the false allegation that it was “disinfo.” This year, she met w/ Twitter/DHS to stress “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.”

Private prison CoreCivic touts boardroom diversity and MLK prison murals as its “ESG” racial equity cred. New feature explores this trend generating big fees for BlackRock & fund managers, woke reputations for corporations — but is society benefitting? interc.pt/3ONxAG7 The NAACP branded social responsibility ETF has largely the same top holdings (Amazon, Tesla, JP Morgan) as ordinary index funds.. except the fees are as much as 16x higher. Asked how this fund helps racial justice, the firm pointed to Amazon allowing a union vote in Alabama (??)

Lawsuit reveals that lawyers for the 9/11 victims promised lobbyists a cut of the $$$ they win from foreign assets. New filings show lawyers are already scrambling to grab a slice of the $3.5 billion seized from the Afghan people - while millions starve. theintercept.com/2022/02/16/afg… Kreindler & Kreindler, one of the law firms that filed yesterday to demand a piece of the $3.5 billion, hired lobbyist firm NVG in December to work on 9/11 litigation issues. NVG's co-founder helped Biden with Asian American outreach during the campaign and is a big Dem donor.

This volunteer says he collected over 12,000 signatures for the successful recall of San Francisco’s school board members. The backlash against woke bullshit in schools is a landslide. The ultra woke school board, every speaker here emphasizes, was *not progressive.* They prioritized shutting down schools, renaming them, categorizing students by race, closing gifted programs — the backlash and the recall, they say, is a revival of progressive politics.

Just read this NYT piece on proposed California state education standards that demand that teachers change curriculums to bring racial identity politics into everyday math lessons. So I click the draft standards and the first section cited this CRT paper. nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/… If you say anything about CRT, you get a gazillion scolds claiming there’s no CRT in schools, nothing inspired by this ideology. When you take literally 2 minutes to look into recent curriculum changes you find it everywhere.

Many people here don't know the history of the 1960s. They think violence helped produce meaningful reforms. But the 1961-1964 was a period of mass nonviolent activism, voter registration, organizing that helped produce the 1964 congressional sweep that gave us Medicare. Medicare was signed into law on July 30, 1965. The following month was the first mega riot of the 1960s, the Watts riot in August 1965, scores of riots followed, w/ many on the left embracing racial sectarianism and promoting "burn baby burn."

Lmao

https://twitter.com/lyta_gold/status/1428011761635143681?s=20

Nothing better than seeing rich over educated leftists like Nathan — constantly online, obsessed w/style & symbols & language policing, who sneers at at actual working class concerns like gun violence — throw a tantrum when asked to live up to any supposedly radical principles.

Bouie is a fabulist when it comes to policing and crime, lots of examples.

Here he invents a conspiracy that police murdered Joshua Brown as a cover up in the Guyger trial. Not remotely true, Brown was killed in a drug deal, his killers confessed.

https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1181666094882398209

Here's his tweet last year falsely claiming that Michael Reinoehl, the antifa guy who murdered a pro-Trump supporter in Portland, was some type of conservative "emulating Kyle Rittenhouse"