Replies to post #423421 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Meanwhile...

Andrea Junker
@Strandjunker
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump made $640 million while “working” in daddy Trump’s administration, and after leaving the White House, Kushner got $2 billion from Saudi Crown Prince MBS for covering up Jamal Khashoggi’s murder.

That is what corruption looks like. Not some laptop.
10:00 AM · Jul 14, 2022
·Twitter for iPhone

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Jared and Ivanka made up to $640 million in the White House
Jordan Libowitz and Caitlin Moniz
February 8, 2021

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump reported between $172 million and $640 million in outside income while working in the White House, according to an analysis of financial disclosures by CREW. It is impossible to tell the exact amount as the income is sometimes reported in broad ranges and cover four months of income before Ivanka Trump officially joined her father’s administration and nearly one month before Jared Kushner joined.

Both Kushner and Trump announced they would not take a salary while working for the government in an attempt to shut down nepotism concerns. While their supporters marked this as a public sacrifice, the massive amount of money they made on the side undercuts that argument, as government salaries would have been less than 1% of their income.

One major factor in their outside profits came from Ivanka Trump’s ownership stake in the Trump Hotel in DC, just blocks from the White House and the locus of influence peddling in the Trump administration. Before business slowed down due to the pandemic, the couple paid a combined 23 visits to the hotel. All told, Ivanka made more than $13 million from the hotel since 2017, dropping from about $4 million a year between 2017 and 2019 to about $1.5 million last year, at least in part due to the pandemic. On top of the drop in revenue, there’s an unexplained drop in the value of her ownership. Having previously claimed it to be worth between $5 million and $25 million, in her final disclosure she listed it as only worth $100,000 to $250,000. She did not report selling any of her ownership share in the hotel.

The hotel was far from Ivanka Trump’s only controversial source of income while working in the White House. In 2018, Ivanka announced she was shutting down her namesake brand, and she later filed a disclosure with the government that “[a]ll operations of the business ceased on July 31, 2018.” But we discovered that she still made up to $1 million from it in 2019 despite the fact that she claimed it no longer existed.

While after four years it’s still a little hard to tell what, exactly, Ivanka actually did in the White House, her tenure was still marked by repeated scandals revolving around potential conflicts of interest with her businesses. While dealing with foreign governments can raise obvious questions for the children of presidents, getting financial or other benefits from foreign governments while working as a senior staffer in your father’s administration should be an obvious non-starter. But when it comes to Ivanka’s time in the administration, getting foreign trademarks to use after leaving the White House may have been her biggest accomplishment.

Just a month before her father was elected president, Russia renewed two trademarks for Ivanka Trump’s business. This would be the start of a pattern. In 2017, Ivanka’s business won preliminary approval for three Chinese trademarks on the same day that she dined with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago. In May 2018, Ivanka’s business was awarded “registration” approval from the Chinese government for five trademark applications, with an additional one getting “first trial approval.” The same week, President Trump announced he would try to save jobs at ZTE, the Chinese telecommunications giant closely tied to the government. A month later, Ivanka’s business got registration approval for three more Chinese trademarks, on the same day her father announced he’d lift sanctions against ZTE.

Ivanka’s business applied for Japanese trademarks the day after her father won the presidency. They were approved around the time of Mike Pence’s visit to Japan where he met with then-Prime Minister Abe. Ivanka also met with Abe, along with her father, about a week after her company applied for the trademarks. She won approval for additional Japanese trademarks in 2017.

In what would become the defining scandal of her time in office, in October 2018 Ivanka’s brand won 16 new trademarks from the Chinese government, including for voting machines. These approvals came about three months after Ivanka announced that her brand was shutting down, and mark the largest number of new Chinese trademarks she received in a single month during the Trump presidency. Six months after the company officially shut down, it received a new trademark to sell the Ivanka brand in Canada. In all, CREW found at least 28 foreign trademarks approved for Ivanka Trump while in the White House.

While most of her work in the White House was fairly nebulous, we do know that she worked on the Trump administration’s implementation of the Opportunity Zones program in 2018, apparently violating conflict of interest law in the process. At the same time that Ivanka was working on Opportunity Zones, Jared owned a significant financial stake in a company called Cadre which offers investment vehicles under the Opportunity Zones program. When Trump and Kushner entered the administration, Kushner’s stake in Cadre was valued between $5 million and $25 million. The value would rise to $25 million to $50 million. Kushner originally failed to disclose his ownership in Cadre. Despite the fact that the top White House ethics official determined at one point that it was “reasonably necessary” for him to divest from Cadre in order to do his job at the White House, he never did.

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump should never have been allowed to work in the White House. The Department of Justice reversed decades of precedent to grant President Trump’s wish to have his children work in the White House. While taking on enormous responsibilities that they were unqualified to carry out, and debasing their positions with constant ethics scandals, they likely made hundreds of millions of dollars from questionable sources. All that was waived off by the same nepotism that got them their jobs. Some “sacrifice.”

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/jared-and-ivanka-made-up-to-640-million-in-the-white-house/

[fuagf]

I Watched the Hunter Biden Movie So You Don’t Have to

'Exactly. What exactly is the corruption exposed by all those messages on a laptop which many people had access to after Hunter allegedly left it. Oh, the one meeting they claim took place that Hunter had arranged between a Russian and his father. That one. Forget Trump's attempt to blackmail Zelensky. And forget all the meetings that actually took place between Trump surrogates and Russians."

Excerpt from below -- "“Maybe in the end, the truth itself became the fairytale,”" -- my emphasis

To watch My Son Hunter is to experience an attempted red-pilling, directed by the bad guy from Goonies.

By Dana Stevens
Sept 09, 20225:40 AM

A vaguely pornographic looking publicity still shows a man (Laurence Fox as Hunter Biden) passed out on the coach, his shirt unbuttoned, and scantily clad strippers all around him, posing for a selfie.


Publicity still via MySonHunter.com

“Politics is downstream from culture,” the conservative journalist and web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart once said, in a phrase that has become a widely circulated maxim in right-wing circles and has kicked off many a chin-stroking newspaper column. In the years since Breitbart’s death in 2012, especially after the site he founded and named after himself was taken over by the harder-right gadfly, conspiracy theorist, and eventual presidential adviser Steve Bannon, this Zen koan for the Federalist Society set has shifted in both meaning and relevance. With the rise of far-right alternative news networks and social-media-fueled disinformation campaigns, the conservative media has become more of a self-sustaining ecosystem. For a significant portion of the Republican electorate, political news and entertainment, often blended into a single toxic stream of anger-stoking falsehoods, now come from the same source, often on the same platform. There is no upstream or downstream, only an ever-flowing ouroboros of frenzied speculation and self-contradictory propaganda. Does what circulates in that fetid loop qualify as fact, fiction, or something in between?

This week, as Bannon turns himself in to New York State authorities on fraud charges, Breitbart Media makes its first foray into feature film distribution with the release of My Son Hunter, a lurid satire about the alleged international shenanigans of the current president’s wayward second son. The scandal of “Hunter Biden’s laptop,” long the source of amusement on the left and furious what-abouting on conservative cable TV, is now a major motion picture, or at least a motion picture shot in Serbia on a crowd-funded budget of $2.5 million. “This is not a true story,” announces Gina Carano, playing a Secret Service agent fond of addressing snarky asides at the camera, in the movie’s hectic opening moments. “Except for the facts.”

Carano’s name may unfortunately be most familiar because of her 2021 firing from the Disney series The Mandalorian .. https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/the-mandalorian-disney-plus-star-wars-baby-yoda-explained.html , rather than because of her memorably raw performance in the Steven Soderbergh action thriller Haywire .. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2012/01/steven_soderbergh_s_haywire_with_gina_carano_reviewed_.html .. or her earlier career as a pro mixed martial arts fighter. Like several other cast members of My Son Hunter, Carano is now a self-announced victim of “cancellation,” cast out of mainstream entertainment for her controversial comments about vaccine mandates, Black Lives Matter protests, and the, in her view, illustrative analogy between the Jewish genocide of the Holocaust and the silencing of conservative voices.

Carano’s fed-up Secret Service agent is far from the central character of My Son Hunter, which takes place mainly over one debauched night in 2019 in the hookers-and-blow-filled Chateau Marmont suite of the prodigal younger son. For the first 40 minutes or so, the protagonist seems to be Hunter himself, a drug-crazed, sweat-glazed, pitifully self-deluded but not entirely unsympathetic figure as played by the nothing-if-not-all-in Laurence Fox. Fox is a British actor, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art who appeared in supporting roles in Robert Altman’s 2001 drawing-room mystery Gosford Park .. https://slate.com/culture/2002/01/robert-altman-s-new-masterpiece.html .. and the long-running ITV detective show Lewis, but who has become better known in recent years for his crusades against “extreme political correctness [crook link].” He has caused controversy for his remarks about COVID lockdowns and casting diversity, and he ran for mayor of London last year on the ticket of his own self-founded “Reclaim Party,” winning just 1.9 percent of the vote. Fox has said he prepared for this role by listening to Hunter Biden’s own audiobook narration of his memoir, Beautiful Things, and his Hunter, as feverishly imagined by the screenwriters Brian Godawa and Phelim McAleer, is the closest thing to a complex character in a film otherwise populated solely by glowering villains and noble whistleblowers. This Hunter is an abject failson in the mode of Donald Trump, Jr., contemptibly loyal to his corrupt father’s twisted vision of family honor.

In this movie’s vision, Joe Biden is at once a doddering fool and a global puppetmaster.

Joe Biden himself, played by John James of the 1980s soap opera Dynasty .. https://slate.com/culture/2011/05/dynasty-revisiting-the-primetime-soap-s-surprisingly-arty-debut-season.html , is a secondary character in terms of screentime, but his behind-the-scenes machinations are what drive the plot. In this movie’s vision, our 46th president is at once a doddering fool and a global puppetmaster, a man who holds his cellphone upside down and struggles to communicate simple ideas in conversation (at one point he begs his son to do all he can to help with the upcoming “erection”) while playing international superpowers off one another like so many casino dice. My Son Hunter is not above getting a laugh or two out of Biden’s well-documented speech impediment: The old man’s rendering of “quid pro quo” comes out as “quick pro crow”—a malapropism whose hilarity is underlined by flashing the words onscreen in all capital letters.

Such narrative interruptions are frequent in My Son Hunter: animated speech bubbles, freeze-framed “fact check” breaks, unannounced swerves into various characters’ fantasy lives, even an exchange between a high-on-crack Hunter and a wise long-haired chihuahua named Shirley. This fluffy sage shows up on the lap of one of the freeloading guests at Hunter’s wild hotel-room party and counsels him, via nonverbal psychic communication, that “these people aren’t your friends.” Director Robert Davi (another outspoken conservative, best known as a bad guy in ’80s films like The Goonies and Licence to Kill) seems intent on copping from the playbook of Adam McKay, who used a similar patchwork approach in movies like The Big Short .. malapropism .. and Vice .. https://slate.com/culture/2018/12/vice-review-dick-cheney-movie-christian-bale.html . The effect of these constant disruptions, combined with the convoluted conspiracy theories My Son Hunter traffics in, is to experience an attempted red-pilling in real time: So you thought this was just the story of a depressed drug addict ranting in a fancy hotel room? Well, what if he was also the tormented scion of the world’s most nefarious crime family? Ever consider that possibility, genius?

In the viewer’s journey down the rabbit hole, our proxy is a fictional character, a stripper named Kitty (Serbian-British newcomer Emma Gojkovic) who starts out as a progressive activist at a Black Lives Matter demonstration and, after a long night spent listening to Hunter’s stories at the Chateau Marmont, emerges as a whistleblowing crusader against the evil Biden empire. At one point in the evening, Hunter’s bodyguard Tyrone, the movie’s only Black character (played by the Nigerian soccer player Franklin Ayodele) encourages her to abandon the mainstream media and research the family’s doings on alternative right-wing sites. When she notes the irony that someone of his race is promoting conservative media channels, he sarcastically calls himself “the Black face of white supremacy .. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-20/recall-candidate-larry-elder-is-a-threat-to-black-californians ,” borrowing a line used last year to describe failed California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder. Whatever disturbing content Kitty may encounter on her descent into the alt-right internet, this exchange implies, it must all be OK: Her Black friend Tyrone sent her there. In a similarly neutralizing move, My Son Hunter takes pains to distance itself from Donald Trump, who is mentioned only rarely and often in a negative context: “I despise the man,” declares Kitty when asked by a reporter whether she is exposing the Bidens as an act of support for Trump. If anything, obsession with the 45th president is mocked as a liberal foible; at one point Hunter, anxious that the damning intel found on his laptop is about to go public, expresses relief that the only topic of interest to the mainstream media is the perennial headline “Orange Man Bad.”

My Son Hunter is not the only recent incursion into feature films by a conservative media company: Last week, Fox News’ entertainment streaming service, Fox Nation, premiered its first original movie production, the largely apolitical romantic drama The Shell Collector, and the conservative site the Daily Wire has distributed three features so far in 2022, one of which similarly stars Carano. The ideal intended viewer for fictional narratives like My Son Hunter appears to be someone who already subscribes to the belief system they spring from: As much of the GOP has decided over the past decade of governance, there is no longer any need to win new voters over to their side, only to keep the ones they have confined in a well-maintained media bubble. My Son Hunter ends with a frankly counterfactual dream sequence, an alternate history in which Rudy Giuliani’s reveal of the lost laptop results in an exposé of the Bidens’ international influence-peddling schemes and a successful 2020 re-election campaign for Trump. “Maybe in the end, the truth itself became the fairytale,” purrs the stripper-turned-justice-crusader into the movie’s oft-perforated fourth wall just before the credits roll. Maybe it did—and maybe that’s just the way the right-wing media wanted it all along.

https://slate.com/culture/2022/09/my-son-hunter-biden-laptop-movie-breitbart-review.html