Against Crony Capitalism Friday Edition

Walz, Kamala, and the future of free speech, Taliban getting $40M a week, Hunter Biden and the Romanian oligarch

Walz! Can you believe it? What a choice.

Part of how I make my living is by staying on top of developing stories almost to the minute during the week. It gives me an odd perspective as I can see narratives develop and morph in real time.

Walz is one weird choice. Going farther left?

It could work. In a world in which a significant portion of the electorate has been wokified he could make sense. He’s a White mid-western dude, with military experience (though that seems to be blowing up right now), but he is on board with the radical wing of the Democratic Party.

The smart money was on Josh Shapiro, a popular, generally “moderate”, definitely electable governor from arguably the most important swing state.

But Mr. Shapiro is Jewish and pro-Israel, and in a Democratic Party that now has members all but openly celebrating Hamas in the House of Representatives on a regular basis, this isn’t OK.

Seems unwise to us, but the Kamala camp appears to believe that the Muslim vote in Michigan and Minnesota is worth tossing Shapiro aside. It’s definitely an inflection point for the Democratic Party.

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The Harris-Walz threat to the First Amendment

Free Speech! Free Speech! A thousand times, Free Speech!

(From The Washington Examiner)

“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy,” Walz said on MSNBC in December 2022, which would be news to the Supreme Court, which unanimously held as recently as 2017 that “speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground” is still protected by the First Amendment…

…By 2019, Harris already had a well-established history of using government power to silence voices she does not like. As attorney general of California, Harris demanded that select conservative nonprofit organizations turn over sensitive IRS documents that revealed the identities of their donors. She claimed she needed the information to combat fraud in the nonprofit sector, …

In a complete “coincidence,” Harris’s office then posted the private data online, an incident that she claimed was purely accidental.

Click here for the article.

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“The fact that they’re comfortable with finding people who’ve said something they disagree with and putting them in a fu***ng cage in England in 2024 is really wild,”