7 Feb, 2025 14:51

Trump suspends ‘Russian oligarch’ hunt

New US Attorney General Pam Bondi has disbanded a task force targeting Russian elites and redirected its resources to fight drug cartels

The US Justice Department under Attorney General Pam Bondi has disbanded Task Force KleptoCapture, a unit created in 2022 to enforce sanctions against Russian oligarchs, The Guardian reported on Thursday citing an internal memo.

Task Force KleptoCapture was launched during the Biden administration following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.It was tasked with tracking and confiscating assets belonging to Russian businessmen and officials targeted by Western sanctions.

According to the DOJ, since the founding of the task force, it has contributed to the seizure of some $700 million in assets belonging to Russian businessmen and has accused more than 70 individuals of violating export controls against Moscow.

Bondi announced the decision to shut down the task force and reallocate its funding to combat drug cartels and transnational criminal organizationsin a memo issued on Wednesday, according to The Guardian. The Justice Department has argued that resources should be focused on domestic and border-related issues rather than targeting foreign elites.

“This policy requires a fundamental change in mindset and approach,” Bondi was quoted as saying in the memo, where she emphasized that the administration prioritizes addressingwhat she described as more immediate security threats.

The decision comes amid broader debates about the handling of Russian state and private assets by the US and its allies. Since 2022, Washington and the European Union have frozen an estimated $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves along with billions in private assets. Western officials have proposed redirecting some of these funds to Ukraine, but legal concerns have slowed such efforts.

Moscow has repeatedly denounced these measures, calling them illegal and equating them to theft. Officials have warned that the seizure of private and state-owned assets could lead to retaliatory measures against Western investments in Russia.

“The theft of Russian assets is a gross violation of international law,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said, responding to past US and EU asset freezes.

Nevertheless, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the country’s economy has been able to withstand unprecedented Western pressure, noting that it has encouraged the development of domestic industry.

Trump has previously signaled a more conciliatory approach toward Russia, hoping to improve relations with Moscow. Despite this, Russian officials have remained cautious about whether Trump’s return to office would lead to significant policy changes. Moscow has expressed skepticism about the extent to which the new administration will deviate from previous US policies on sanctions and financial restrictions.

https://www.rt.com/news/612346-trump-ends-russian-oligarch-witch-hunt/

They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now

By Jeffrey A. Tucker, Debbie LermanOctober 30, 20241/3

Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization.

Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.

It’s not always about being censored or not.Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views beforeYouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people.Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.

Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.

Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines,there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users.In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.

The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock,Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.

In other words,the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.

It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums.That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true.It was the same with the World Health Organizationand its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.

What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they postedunless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.

https://brownstone.org/articles/they-are-scrubbing-the-internet-right-now/

>>22534405

2/3

We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know.Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:

Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security.

The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.

==Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution]] that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.

To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”

When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.

Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now,but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.

Thus the ==two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November

5th election==.

Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank.Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.

Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent.Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.

This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.

https://brownstone.org/articles/they-are-scrubbing-the-internet-right-now/

>>22534421

3/3

Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.”Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.

Here’s what happened next.In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.

No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone.Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankingsof anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.

All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.

One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like.The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.

As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived.

What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recoursewill be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.

The Internet was founded to be free and democratic.It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.

https://brownstone.org/articles/they-are-scrubbing-the-internet-right-now/

Raheem J. Kassam Analysis1/3

Trump Is Right to Shutter USAID, And Its Founder JFK Would Likely Agree.

It’s impossible to say “all” foreign aid, especially that which passes through the Kennedy-era United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is “wasted.” But it is equally impossible to assess that a majority of foreign aid “works.” Therein lies the rub for the U.S. taxpayer, and the moral imperative for the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (officially the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization) to go about fisking USAID as one of its first orders of business.

Without repeat and loud, evidenced, and exemplified assurances that their lives and the lives of others are being made better, safer, and freeras a result of their coercive investment, there exists no ethical justification for gifting away $50bn or so a year.

Nor was it ever envisioned as such an entity, with its earliest advocates such as President John F. Kennedy–oft falsely invoked by thelegacy media–acknowledging that America’s 1960s aid efforts were meant to usher in “a decade of development.”

It has now been 6.4 decades, and reading JFK’s letter to Congress on the subject from March 1961, it is easy to see how he would likely agree with President Trump on streamlining America’s soft power efforts.

Kennedy made the following points from the get-go:

1. Existing foreign aid programs and concepts are largely unsatisfactory and unsuited for our needs and for the needs of the underdeveloped world as it enters the Sixties.

2. The economic collapse of those free but less-developed nations which now stand poised between sustained growth and economic chaos would be disastrous to our national security, harmful to our comparative prosperity and offensive to our conscience.

3.’’’’There exists, in the 1960’s, an historic opportunity for a major economic assistance effort by the free industrialized nations to move more than half the people of the less-developed nations into self-sustained economic growth, while the rest move substantially closer to the day when they, too, will no longer have to depend on outside assistance’’’.

He elaborated: “For no objective supporter of foreign aid can be satisfied with the existing program-actually a multiplicity of programs. Bureaucratically fragmented, awkward, and slow, its administration is diffused over a haphazard and irrational structure covering at least four departments and several other agencies.”

Nothing truer could be said for USAID’s efforts today, barring the addendum that much of this so-called “aid” ends up in the hands of dictators, oligarchs, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and is, too often, highly ideologically charged.

Part two of Kennedy’s message was even more explicit: the moral and strategic imperatives (especially vis-a-vis communism) must dovetail. Given the far-left nature of much of America’s foreign aid projects, this can hardly be used as rationale today. Furthermore, if the aim is beating back the new Soviets in the former of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), we are scarcely playing by the same rules.

For every dollar America spends on drag queen story hours in Mozambique (or something equally asinine),China spends two dollars building or acquiring ports, developing infrastructure, and entrenching itself and its interests in any given nation’s technological and economic base.

America, meanwhile, has been fighting culture and currency wars, relying more on McDonald’s and the Federal Reserve than on the notion of fostering economic interoperability and interdependence.

https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis-post/trump-is-right-to-shutter-usaid-and-its-founder-jfk-would-likely-agree/

>>22534458

2/3

Fast food and feds are the least of America’s aid problems; however, rage-inducing examples of globalist profligacy have been pouring out of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in recent days. Million for diversity programs in Serbia; electric vehicle commitments in Vietnam, sex changes and LGBT rights activism in Guatemala; tourism in Egypt (did they need new Pyramids?), as well as the bizarre and irredeemably corrupt practice of dishing out millions in subsidies to legacy media outlets like POLITICO.

The National Pulse, on the other hand, was amongst the first publications to expose how USAID even had a hand in funding the so-called “gain of function” work at the now-infamous Wuhan Lab via a non-governmental group (NGO), the EcoHealth Alliance.

THE NGO-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.

As discussed in 2018, government aid programs and taxpayer-funded charity work have long been leveraged as sovereign wealth funds for so-called NGOs–most of which, at best, represent a drastic perversion of the charitable sector.

Many of these groups are not “non-governmental” in a strict sense. They couldn’t function without taxpayer cash, and they both give advice to and receive marching orders from government bureaucrats. At most, they are an unconstitutional extension of the state, operating with public money but no oversight. In an ideal world, most government-funded NGO activity would actually be unlawful. If the charity sector cannot sustain a perceived necessity, it is far better to have the activities directly answerable to Congress, if they should exist at all.

The U.S. State Department’s website confesses there are “[a]pproximately 1.5 million NGOs operate in the United States,” adding: “Indeed, NGOs exist to represent virtually every cause imaginable. Their sources of finance include donations from private individuals (American or foreign), private sector for-profit companies, philanthropic foundations, or grants from federal, state, or local government. Sources of finance may also include foreign governments. There is no prohibition in U.S. law on foreign funding of NGOs; whether that foreign funding comes from governments or non-government sources.”

There are, in fact, countless examples of foreign-funded NGOs actively working inside the United States in order to undermine its national borders, sovereignty, and the rights of its own natural-born citizens. But with friends like the American-funded NGOs on their own, who even needs these enemies?

It should be a policy priority to restrict the foreign funding of organizations such as these. The only reason it is currently not is reciprocal bans would follow within nations wherein the U.S. routinely interferes. Good. Such a move would only serve to expedite the destruction of what has become known as The Fifth Estate.

Modern NGOs are not the “little platoons” encouraged by Edmund Burke, nor do they represent the “American associations” reflected upon by Alexis de Tocqueville.

The fervent establishment opposition to President Trump’s USAID changes is because they know they are in an existential fight. Not just the employees but also the donor class. The usual foundations and grantees who steer political NGO priorities (read: mass migration and open borders, climate change, foreign interventionism, abortion access, and more) have lurched from the largesse of the Biden regime to the threat of institutional collapse within a few short months.

Truly, this is a ‘dark MAGA‘ moment, echoing Lord Byron’s poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

“Here is the moral of all human tales, Tis but the same rehearsal of the past. First freedom and then glory; when that fails Wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last. And history, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page.”

https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis-post/trump-is-right-to-shutter-usaid-and-its-founder-jfk-would-likely-agree/

>>22534462

3/3

The wealthy, viceful, and corrupt actors at the heart of decades of the NGO-industrial complex now stand before us, pants around their ankles, in some cases fuming, in others pleading for their grift. MAGA should offer no quarter.

FOREVER-AID.

The well-received 2005 book by Bush-era economists R. Glenn Hubbard and William Dugan stated, “Overall, we might estimate that only 10 percent of USAID supports local business”—another starkly divergent approach from that espoused by Kennedy and USAID’s early enthusiasts.

The idea of the “decade of development” was to lift allied nations and those susceptible to the lures of communism out of poverty, not trap them in a cycle that sees some Kalorama-dwelling non-profit CEO take home $2,000,000 a year in basic salary to assess their needs and delivery them white papers on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Kennedy pledged in ’61 that “approximately $2 billion out of the requested $2.4 billion in economic aid will be spent directly for goods and services benefiting the American economy,” which is in no way close to the situation with foreign economic aid. Additionally, those 1961 numbers represent half as much in aid spending–at the height of the Cold War, no less!–than America gives away today.

The 35th President was explicit, in fact, on the topic of forever-aid: “We must say to the less-developed nations, if they are willing to undertake necessary internal reform and self-help… that we then intend during this coming decade of development to achieve a decisive turn-around in the fate of the less-developed world, looking toward the ultimate day when all nations can be self-reliant and when foreign aid will no longer be needed.”

For further reading on the exploitative nature of USAID bureaucrats, one can consult a Heritage briefing issued in 2022, which enumerates the Biden-era priorities which ultimately led to the most recent, heightened scrutiny of the NGO-sector’s work in the United States. Or one can simply pay attention to the dozens of horror stories emerging from the ‘DOGE’ teams encounters with spending data–a phenomenon that must surely kickstart a trend of equal amounts of scrutiny for every government department, not least the Department of Defense.

For the few USAID programs that actually promote American interests, a handful of State Department and embassy staff in the relevant and respective nations concerned can and should be able to take care of it. For the rest, it is the beginning of a great reset, in order to avert that last line of Byron’s narrative: “barbarism at last.”

https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis-post/trump-is-right-to-shutter-usaid-and-its-founder-jfk-would-likely-agree/

>>22534480

God I hope so.

>>22534364

Honestly his face just irritates the shit out of me.

>>22534339

notablethat made my eyes water with an allergy reaction