Tag: corruption

Is your favorite influencer’s opinion bought and sold?

Your addictive doomscrolling on X, TikTok or Instagram may also be the latest nexus for millions of dollars in secret political corruption.

Over the last month, the problem has come into sharp relief. Newly surfaced documents show that more than 500 social media creators were part of a covert electioneering effort by Democratic donors to shape the presidential election in favor of Kamala Harris. Payments went to party members with online followings but also to non-political influencers — people known for comedy posts, travel vlogs or cooking YouTubes — in exchange for “positive, specific pro-Kamala content” meant to create the appearance of a groundswell of support for the former vice president.

Meanwhile, a similar pay-to-post effort among conservative influencers publicly unraveled. The goal was to publish messages in opposition to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push to remove sugary soda beverages from eligible SNAP food stamp benefits. Influencers were allegedly offered money to denounce soda restrictions as “an overreach that unfairly targets consumer choice” and encouraged to post pictures of President Trump enjoying Coca-Cola products. After right-leaning reporter Nick Sortor pointed out the near-identical messages on several prominent accounts, posts came down and at least one of the influencers apologized: “That was dumb of me. Massive egg on my face. In all seriousness, it won’t happen again.”

In both schemes, on the left and the right, those creating the content made little to no effort to disclose that payments could be involved. For ordinary users stumbling on the posts and videos, what they saw would have seemed entirely organic.

In the influencers’ defense, they didn’t break any rules — because none exist.

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When City Hall Chooses the Mob

In Seattle last weekend, violence broke out—not from the pulpit, but from the pavement.

Pastors and churchgoers, gathered for a permitted worship event in a city park, found themselves besieged by a black-clad mob who attempted to tear down fencing, rush the stage, and shout them down.

The attackers were not counter-protesters in any constitutional sense of the word. They were masked militants whose tactics have become a hallmark of Antifa: organized, aggressive, and aimed not at persuasion but suppression.

To their credit, the Seattle police intervened. Arrests were made. Barricades held. For a moment, law reasserted itself in a city too long governed by hesitation.

Then came the mayor.

Bruce Harrell, elected to lead but seemingly content to triangulate, did not respond with praise for law enforcement or a reaffirmation of Seattle’s civic obligations to neutrality and free expression.

Instead, he questioned the Christian group’s presence—why they had been issued a permit and why their event had not been relocated to a “less provocative” area.

Translated: The fault lies not with the mob—heaven forbid—but those who dared to speak within earshot of it.

This goes beyond appeasement or failed civic leadership. The mayor effectively signaled that the rule of law in Seattle is conditional—and that those who assault Christians may expect indulgence, while those who dare to preach in public may expect scrutiny.

Harrell’s statement is a masterclass in moral evasion. It nods toward “anarchists,” then downplays their aggression with sanitized language like “infiltrated” and “disrupted”—as if masked militants had simply wandered in with the breeze.

Rather than commend his officers or affirm the constitutional right of peaceful assembly, Harrell issued a statement directing the Parks Department to reexamine the permitting process and urging the police to produce an after-action report focused on crowd management tactics and the arrests themselves.

The subtext was unmistakable: those arrested may soon be recast as misunderstood protesters, and the officers who protected the event could find themselves under internal review.

In Seattle, even enforcing the law can become grounds for investigation—if you defend the wrong group.

The mayor then implies that the real danger lies in “far-right” speech held in a historically LGBTQ+ neighborhood. In other words, the public square is now zoned for ideology.

Speech rights may exist on paper but are conditional—revocable if your message strays from the orthodoxy or irritates Seattle’s cringeworthy Mayor LaTrivia, always eager with bureaucratic balm for the mob’s bruised feelings.

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American Backlash: Why the Letitia James Mortgage Fraud Investigation Resonates with Americans

“We’re going to definitely sue him. We’re going to be a real pain in the ass. He’s going to know my name personally,” Letitia James said during her 2018 campaign for New York attorney general.

James campaigned openly on her intention to target President Donald Trump, describing him as an “illegitimate president” and an “embarrassment,” while pledging to pursue all legal avenues to scrutinize his finances and real estate transactions. After being elected, she said, “I look forward to seeing him in court when I assume my new position.”

Upon taking office in 2019, James promptly followed through, filing a lawsuit that ultimately led to a $454 million civil judgment against Trump and his organization for allegedly “overvaluing assets” on mortgage applications – despite industry-standard disclaimers advising lenders to conduct their own valuations.

But despite all of James’ efforts to harm him politically, Donald Trump won the presidency in a landslide in 2024. What happened?

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Meet The Mortgage Company Enabling Illegal Immigrants To Buy American Homes

After decades of mass illegal immigration into the United States, untold millions of illegal aliens have settled throughout the country, competing with Americans for government benefits, jobs, and now, for homes.

For most illegal aliens, obtaining a mortgage from a traditional bank — without a social security number or a credit score — is nearly impossible. But as millions of illegal aliens flooded the country, a new industry has cropped up to capitalize on the new customer base, selling financing catered to the illegal population.

One entity at the forefront of this industry, a Daily Wire investigation has revealed, is Prysma Lending, which has given out more than a billion dollars in loans in red and blue states alike as it blatantly targets illegal aliens.

Trump pledged to ban mortgages for illegal aliens on the campaign trail and his administration took action in March to prevent government-backed mortgages from going to illegal aliens. But Prysma is one of several companies — including Colony Ridge, the Texas development that The Daily Wire exposed as a magnet for illegal aliens — that uses a different financial tactic that isn’t impacted by the administration’s recent rule change, which specifically targeted loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration.

The company prides itself on “empowering the Latino community to achieve homeownership” in its Spanish-language Instagram bio. The company’s president, Monica Serva, says she started Prysma with the intent of “helping the Latino community” because she “realized how unfairly minorities were treated.”

But Prysma revealed that its business model relied on illegal aliens, in particular, when it hosted a webinar with an immigration lawyer to answer their customers’ questions about the risk of deportation in the days following President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

The company is evidently concerned that its clientele could be deported, or at least that potential customers could be dissuaded from buying a home in a country that they fear they could be removed from.

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Media Falls Over Itself To Defend South African President Who Claimed Genocidal Chants Were Free Speech

Last week, President Donald Trump confronted South African leaders over the alleged genocide taking place against white South African farmers. Trump presented South African leaders — and the media — with video evidence of racially charged rhetoric advocating for the murder of white farmers. One such video showed political leader Julius Malema leading chants of “kill the Boer” and “Revolution demands at some point there must be killing.”

The propaganda press were quick to not only dismiss the genocidal chants, but to defend South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who didn’t seem eager to confront and condemn the chants. Outlets dropped all pretense of objectivity to paint Ramaphosa as a measured statesman blindsided by Trump.

NPR’s Kate Bartlett wrote “South Africa’s president is praised for staying calm during Trump’s Oval Office ambush.” Bartlett praised Ramaphosa for keeping “his cool” and heralded him as “one of the key mediators in the talks that ended apartheid in 1994.”

The talking point was quickly spread amongst the propagandists, with Reuters’ Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo and Alexander Winning writing: “Buffeted by Trump, South Africa’s Ramaphosa praised for keeping his cool.”

But perhaps it’s easy to “keep cool” when your government doesn’t appear to have any serious moral objection to openly genocidal rhetoric.

Despite their best attempt to cover for South African leaders, upon returning from the United States, South Africa’s president excused the genocidal chants as merely free speech.

Speaking to reporters, Ramaphosa said the chant is a “liberation chant.”

Liberation from what, exactly? White farmers? And how will that liberation occur if not through violence, as some South African political leaders are calling for?

“We take into account what the constitutional court also decided when it said that, you know, that slogan, ‘Kill the Boer, kill the farmer,’ is a liberation chant and slogan,” Ramaphosa said.

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President Trump’s Crypto Czar, David Sacks, Says Elizabeth Warren Behind Biden Regime Anti-Crypto Agenda… ‘Controlled Autopen’

In a fiery Fox Business interview on Tuesday, President Trump’s newly appointed Crypto and AI Czar, David Sacks, pulled no punches — directly accusing radical leftist Senator Elizabeth Warren of running the Biden White House’s infamous autopen and using it as a weapon to “terrorize” the crypto community.

Sacks, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned pro-Trump policymaker, didn’t mince words during the interview.

He accused “Pocahontas” Warren of waging a personal war against digital finance, calling her actions a “pathological hatred” of crypto.

Sacks: “This is the financial system of the future, Jessie, and we have to encourage it. What the Biden administration was doing—and let’s face it, it wasn’t Biden—Elizabeth Warren controlled the autopen during that administration.

She, for some reason, has this pathological hatred of the crypto community. She wants to drive this community offshore; she doesn’t want it happening in the United States. That’s the wrong policy for the United States.

We want all the innovation happening here. This is a financial system of the future. It’s cheaper, it’s more efficient—we want it happening here, Jessie. And I think people are thrilled that President Trump is making that possible.”

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Star Harvard business professor stripped of tenure, fired for manipulating data in studies on dishonesty

A renowned Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired after an investigation found she fabricated data on multiple studies focused on dishonesty. 

Francesca Gino, a celebrated behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, was let go after the school’s top governing board determined she tweaked observations in four studies so that their findings boosted her hypotheses, GHB reported.

Harvard administrators notified business faculty that Gino was out of a job in a closed-door meeting this past week, the outlet reported.

Harvard did not detail the professor’s firing or tenure being stripped — citing it as a personnel matter — but told GHB that the school had not revoked a professor’s tenure in decades.

No professors have had their tenure revoked at Harvard since the 1940s, when the American Association of University Professors formalized termination rules, according to The Harvard Crimson.

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Trump Grants Full Pardon for Former Virginia Sheriff

President Donald Trump on Monday said he has pardoned Scott Jenkins, the former sheriff of Virginia’s Culpeper County, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison following a federal bribery conviction.

Trump made the announcement on his Truth Social platform, calling Jenkins a victim of “an overzealous Biden Department of Justice” who “doesn’t deserve to spend a single day in jail.”

A federal jury in December 2024 found Jenkins guilty on all 12 counts of conspiracy, fraud, and bribery in connection with his 2023 reelection campaign. Prosecutors said he accepted at least $72,000 in cash bribes in exchange for badges through the county’s auxiliary sheriff’s deputy program.

According to court documents, several individuals, including three co-defendants and two undercover FBI agents, were promised official Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office badges and identification, despite not being trained, vetted, or performing any law enforcement duties.Jenkins maintained his innocence, while his three co-defendants pleaded guilty. His defense argued that the payments were legitimate campaign contributions and that it was within his authority as a sheriff to designate auxiliary deputy sheriffs.

In March, Jenkins was sentenced to 10 years in prison and had filed an appeal.

Trump came to Jenkins’s defense on Monday, accusing the judge who presided over the case of being politically motivated and excluding exculpatory evidence in favor of the sheriff during the trial.

The judges allegedly “allow into evidence what they feel like, not what is mandated under the Constitution and Rules of Evidence,” the president wrote.

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Bill Proposes Ban on Stock Trading for Congress Members

U.S. Senator Mark Kelly from Arizona has put forward a bill that aims to put an end to congressional stock trading. This legislation, known as the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act, would require all members of Congress, along with their spouses and children, to place their stocks into a blind trust or sell them off. Kelly’s office insists this move is necessary to prevent any use of insider information for personal gain.

Kelly emphasized that as Americans struggle with rising living costs, they should not have to worry about their elected officials making money through insider trading. He was clear in his statement, “The only way to stop insider trading in Congress is to stop members of Congress from trading stocks. Period.” Kelly seems confident that the American public is on his side with this issue.

Backing up his stance, Kelly referenced a survey conducted by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland. The survey found that a staggering 86% of Americans support such legislation. This includes a solid majority across political lines: 88% of Democrats, 87% of Republicans, and 81% of Independents.

Kelly is hopeful that this bill will help restore trust in the government and address some of the issues plaguing Washington. Senator Jon Ossoff from Georgia has also taken up the cause, introducing the bill alongside Kelly. Ossoff pointed out that members of Congress have unique access to confidential information, which they could potentially exploit for financial gain.

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Biden Aide Admits Liberal Admin Did ‘Undemocratic Things’ to Try and Stop Trump

In a candid admission, a longtime aide to former President Joe Biden reportedly revealed that White House staff felt justified in taking “undemocratic” actions during his administration, believing that President Donald Trump posed an existential threat to American democracy.

This revelation emerged during an appearance by Axios reporter Alex Thompson on Fox News Sunday, where he discussed insights from his reporting on the former Biden administration.

Thompson described a prevailing mindset among unelected aides, who saw themselves as the true decision-makers, often shielding Biden from scrutiny and managing the presidency behind the scenes.

“If you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy, you can rationalize anything, including sometimes doing undemocratic things,” Thompson stated.

The aide’s remarks suggest a troubling rationale for actions taken in the name of protecting democracy.

In one notable comment, the aide remarked that Biden “just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years,” implying that the president could step back while his staff handled the day-to-day operations.

“He’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while,” the aide added, emphasizing the tight control exercised by an inner circle of staff members over Biden’s schedule and public interactions.

This admission raises important questions about the nature of governance in a democracy and the lengths to which individuals might go when they perceive a significant threat.

Critics have long pointed to the tensions between security and democratic principles, and this incident illustrates the challenges faced by those in power when navigating such dilemmas.

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