Silicon Valley investors embrace Trump after years of leaning left: ‘Impossible to support Biden’

https://nypost.com/2024/05/24/business/silicon-valley-investors-turn-against-biden-embrace-trump

Some Silicon Valley venture capitalists have begun to turn against President Biden while openly touting their support for former President Donald Trump — a sea change for an industry that has overwhelmingly supported Democrats in years past.

Prominent moguls such as David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, Marc Andreessen and Shaun Maguire have grown disillusioned with signature Biden policy proposals such as his call for a 25% “billionaire tax” as well as antitrust crackdowns waged by the Federal Trade Commission.

“It’s impossible to support Biden,” Keith Rabois, an early executive at PayPal who also played a role in the growth of LinkedIn, Square and Slide, told the New York Times.

While Rabois said he was not a fan of Trump, he would be “focused on electing a GOP Congress and Senate.”

Tech executives are also unhappy with the stringent regulations imposed on the cryptocurrency sector by Gary Gensler, Biden’s pick to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Lina Khan, Biden’s chair of the FTC, has sought to move aggressively against large tech companies that critics say have amassed too much power in the marketplace.

Khan unsuccessfully challenged Microsoft’s $70 billion acquisition of video game maker Activision Blizzard as well as Meta’s attempt to buy virtual reality startup Within. Last year, the FTC sued Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of being a monopoly.

Andreessen, founder of powerhouse VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, recently said there are “real issues” with the Biden administration.

A second Trump administration would be staffed by “very different kinds of people,” particularly at the SEC and FTC, Andreessen said in a recent podcast interview.

Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in a blog post last year that his company would support any politician who backed “an optimistic technology-enabled future.”

Sacks, the entrepreneur and investor who made his fortune as chief operating officer at PayPal during its early days, plans to host a fundraiser for Trump as well as interview the former president on his “All In” podcast.

Following the incident, Sacks said the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol disqualified Trump from elected office.

But four years of a Biden presidency have changed Sacks’ mind, according to the New York Times.

Red Lobster staff dish on the toxic and demoralizing workplace and how Thai bosses destroyed the world's largest seafood chain

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13459173/Red-Lobster-staff-toxic-work-thai-union-shrimp.html

• Red Lobster staff opened up about the 'miserable' environment at the workplace

• They blamed Thai bosses for the decline of the world's largest seafood chain

• The company confirmed on Sunday it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection

Staff at Red Lobster have opened up about the 'miserable' environment at the workplace and blamed Thai bosses for the decline of the world's largest seafood chain.

The company confirmed on Sunday it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection days after shuttering nearly 100 restaurants across America. It has been struggling with rising leases and labor costs in recent years and also promotions like its iconic all-you-can-eat shrimp deal that backfired.

Now former workers at the seafood restaurant chain have claimed majority owner Thai Union contributed to a toxic work environment and destroyed Red Lobster.

'It was miserable working there for the last year-and-a-half I was there,' West Coast division vice president Les Foreman told CNN.

Former Red Lobster executive Foreman worked at the company for 20 years before he was fired in 2022.

'They didn’t have any idea about running a restaurant company in the United States,' he said.

Thai Union blamed the pandemic and 'sustained industry headwinds, higher interest rates and rising material and labor costs' for the issues Red Lobster has faced.

But former employees claim it was the ineptitude of the bosses which led to its downfall.

They said dozen of Red Lobster leaders with a deep understanding of the brand were fired or resigned and Thai Union replaced them with its own executives.

>A former leader claimed Thai Union CEO Thiraphong Chansiri visited the chain's headquarters in 2022 and brought along a feng shui consultant.

He said the consultant determined the offices in Orlando were 'bad Feng shui and no one should use them', and they later sat empty. The former Red Lobster workers said the work environment at the headquarters became toxic and demoralizing before interim CEO Paul Kenny took over in 2022.

Kenny allegedly made derogatory comments about Red Lobster employees and criticized them at meetings, according to one source. A previous executive claimed the former CEO commented on a woman's weight at a conference in Dallas two years ago.

'We need to institute an exercise program in this company,' he is accused of saying.

Red Lobster also cut two of its longtime shrimp suppliers in order to purchase more from Thai Union at a higher cost, according to the company's bankruptcy filing.

'Thai Union exercised an outsized influence on the Company’s shrimp purchasing,' Red Lobster alleged in the document. But Thai Union said the accusations were 'meritless' and it looked forward to the 'full representation of the facts'.

Former employees claimed they were pressured by representatives of Thai Union to buy more seafood from their company. 'Our suppliers were really upset that [Thai Union representatives] were in those meetings with them,' one person said. There were a host of changes to the restaurant operations which led to a decrease in sales.

It began leaving the tails on shrimp in pasta and and eliminated sauté stations, according to a former employee. Servers were also asked to cover 10 tables instead of three and a host was removed from the entrance during lunch hours.

Barry Fulghum, who rose to become an operations director from a dishwasher at Red Lobster in the 1970s, said: 'There would be times we would have one or two people working the kitchen line. 'What those cooks did on the line was amazing given the staffing situation they were dealt.'

North Carolina House pauses passage of bill that would ban masking for health reasons

https://apnews.com/article/north-carolina-protests-masks-b0a929d65ba3d44b0c1c2e659a2b586b

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina bill partially meant to address mask-wearing at protests was under review Wednesday after some House Republicans raised issue with the legislation’s impact on people who wear masks for health reasons.

The state House voted not to accept changes made to the bill by the state Senate that would remove a pandemic-era masking exemption for health purposes.

Aside from the health exemption removal, the bill would enhance penalties for people who wear masks while committing a crime and for people who block roadways during a demonstration. The bill comes, in part, as a response to widespread college protests, including on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s campus, about the war in Gaza.

The House’s vote means the legislation will head to a team of lawmakers to negotiate revisions to it.

(pictured) Rep. Erin Pare, the only Republican who represents part of Wake County, posted on the social platform X over the weekend saying she opposed the bill’s removal of the health exemption — a law passed along mostly bipartisan lines during the start of the pandemic in 2020. The bill as written has already caused confusion for the public, she said. “The right thing to do here is to add back the deleted provisions regarding medical masking and give the public clarity on the issue,” she wrote.

Due to the GOP’s slim supermajority in both chambers, the party needs every Republican vote to secure the bill’s passage, or it could fail.

House Speaker Tim Moore told reporters after the vote that he understood why the Senate proposed its changes to the bill, but there was interest in the House to draft language to maintain health and safety protections for masking.

Before Pare took her stance publicly, many Senate Democrats repeatedly echoed concerns that immunocompromised people could be targeted for wearing a mask in public. Republican supporters have said the bill’s intention isn’t to criminalize masking for health reasons but rather to stop people from concealing their identity while committing a crime.

Legislative staff said in a Senate committee last week that masking for health purposes would violate the proposed law.

Clinton says women abandoned her because she wasn’t ‘perfect’

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4685788-hillary-clinton-women-abandoned-her-2016-election-new-york-times-interview

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reflected on her 2016 presidential campaign, saying in a recent interview that female voters deserted her in the last days of the campaign because she was “not perfect.”

“They left me because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect,” Clinton said in an interview with The New Times, published Saturday. “They were willing to take a risk on [former President Trump] — who had a long list of, let’s call them flaws, to illustrate his imperfection — because he was a man, and they could envision a man as president and commander in chief.”

Clinton wasn’t the only one to share that sentiment during the 2016 election cycle, when the former first lady lost to Trump. Several of her allies described a sexist double standard on the campaign trail, saying she dealt with questions and criticisms that male candidates would not face.

“Is there a double standard? One hundred percent times 100 percent,” Tracy Sefl, a Democratic consultant and Clinton surrogate, said at the time. “And God forbid if she coughs.”

More recently, former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley faced her own set of sexist attacks, before suspending her campaign in March. During a Republican primary debate last year in Miami, fellow candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — who dropped from the race in January and endorsed Trump — referred to her as “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels.”

In the interview with the Times, Clinton also went after members of her party for what she said was a long-term failure in not shoring up abortion rights. She argued that Democrats didn’t fully estimate the power of anti-abortion powers until most of them were “taken by surprise” with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, which ended the federal right to abortion access.

“We didn’t take it seriously, and we didn’t understand the threat,” Clinton said. “Most Democrats, most Americans, did not realize we are in an existential struggle for the future of this country.”

“We could have done more to fight,” she added in the interview, which was originally conducted by the publication in February.

>>20913423 (me)

Hillary Clinton gives dire warning on abortion: ‘We could have done more to fight’

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4685823-hillary-clinton-dire-warning-abortion-rights-new-york-times-interview

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a new interview criticized her fellow Democrats for their response to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, arguing they could have “done more.”

“We didn’t take it seriously, and we didn’t understand the threat,” Clinton said in an interview with The New York Times, published Saturday. “Most Democrats, most Americans, did not realize we are in an existential struggle for the future of this country.”

“We could have done more to fight,” she added.

The former first lady issued a dire warning in the interview, conducted in February, claiming that Democrats spent decades in a state of denial that abortion rights — which had been enshrined for generations under Roe v. Wade — could be revoked. While in that state, Clinton said the anti-abortion movement was able to chip away at the legal precedent until it was too late.

“One thing I give the right credit for is they never give up,” Clinton said. “They are relentless. You know, they take a loss, they get back up, they regroup, they raise more money.”

“It’s tremendously impressive the way that they operate. And we have nothing like it on our side,” she added.

The former presidential nominee also slammed the conservative justices on the high court who handed down the history-making Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling, which handed abortion access decisions back to the states. She also hit Democrats in the Senate, who, she said, didn’t do enough to stop those justices from being appointed.

“Our side was complacent and kind of taking it for granted and thinking it would never go away,” she said in the interview, per the Times. Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election to former President Trump, said she tried to raise alarms during her campaign about anti-abortion efforts, but was largely dismissed as an alarmist. The Times noted that polling and focus groups from that time showed voters truly did not believe that Roe v. Wade was at risk.

With Trump in the middle of his third campaign, Clinton warned that the election this fall is “existential” because it could mean a small group of conservatives would continue “turning the clock back on women.”

Following the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that resulted in controversy around in vitro fertilization, Clinton warned that birth control would be next on the to-do list for Republicans who want to restrict women’s rights. In the same interview, the former secretary also signaled that she faced sexism while on the campaign trail, claiming she was deserted by female voters because she was “not perfect.”

>>20913573

So 'she was out shopping a couple months ago', walking briskly….most people didn't think it looked like her. If she's doing chemo, her hair all fell out and she's under 100lbs. Did [they] Diana her?

>>20913689

I AM VERY POSITIVE AND OPEN MINDED TO CRYPTOCURRENCY COMPANIES, AND ALL THINGS RELATED TO THIS NEW AND BURGEONING INDUSTRY. OUR COUNTRY MUST BE THE LEADER IN THE FIELD. THERE IS NO SECOND PLACE. CROOKED JOE BIDEN, ON THE OTHER HAND, THE WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY, WANTS IT TO DIE A SLOW AND PAINFUL DEATH. THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN WITH ME!

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/112503319133425856

>>20913692

so anyway

Pronouns and tribal affiliations are now forbidden in South Dakota public university employee emails

A new South Dakota policy to stop the use of gender pronouns by public university faculty and staff in official correspondence is also keeping Native American employees from listing their tribal affiliations in a state with a long and violent history of conflict with tribes.

Two University of South Dakota faculty members, Megan Red Shirt-Shaw and her husband, John Little, have long included their gender pronouns and tribal affiliations in their work email signature blocks. But both received written warnings from the university in March that doing so violated a policy adopted in December by the South Dakota Board of Regents.

“I was told that I had 5 days to remove my tribal affiliation and pronouns,” Little said in an email to The Associated Press. “I believe the exact wording was that I had ‘5 days to correct the behavior.’ If my tribal affiliation and pronouns were not removed after the 5 days, then administrators would meet and make a decision whether I would be suspended (with or without pay) and/or immediately terminated.”

The policy is billed by the board as a simple branding and communications policy. It came only months after Republican Gov. Kristi Noem sent a letter to the regents that railed against “liberal ideologies” on college campuses and called for the board to ban drag shows on campus and “remove all references to preferred pronouns in school materials,” among other things.

All nine voting members of the board were appointed by Noem, whose remarks in March accusing tribal leaders of benefitting from illegal drug cartels and not properly caring for children has prompted most South Dakota tribes to ban her from their land.

South Dakota’s change comes in the midst of a conservative quest to limit diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives gaining momentum in state capitals and college governing boards around the country, with about one-third of the states taking some sort of action against it. The college faculty advocacy group American Association of University Professors is not aware of any other faculty at a public university in the U.S. being required to drop their preferred pronouns in official correspondence, spokesman Kelly Benjamin said.

“Anecdotally I’ll say, because I live in Florida and have seen what’s happened with all the anti-wokeness and targeting of education here, I know this is part and parcel to a longer-term agenda,” Benjamin said.

A spokeswoman for the University of South Dakota declined to answer questions about whether its administrators or the University Faculty Senate had been consulted before regents adopted the policy, referring questions to the Board of Regents.

Shuree Mortenson, a spokeswoman for the regents, said all six universities under the regents board umbrella were given the opportunity to review the policy, “but ultimately, the Board of Regents made this decision.” She declined to say whether other faculty at any of the five other schools had received warnings about not using gender pronouns, tribal affiliation or other identifiers, but defended the new policy as providing “consistency to safeguard the brand.”

https://apnews.com/article/pronouns-tribal-affiliation-south-dakota-66efb8c6a3c57a6a02da0bf4ed575a5f

>muh pronouns

>muh tribe

….if Noem is correct and many Native American tribes are cartels (or are helping the cartels), she's doing them a favor by not allowing them to identify with the criminal entities.

Pika Pika (Pikachu)

>>20913863