A federal court ruled Pete Hegseth’s transgender military ban is likely unconstitutional and built on animus. The judge quoted Groucho Marx. Hegseth answered with four words.
Read MoreA Court Just Called Pete Hegseth’s Trans Troop Ban a Cover Story
Posts in GriftMatrix
#2: Memphis Failed Boxtown Long Before Elon Musk Came To Town
Part 2 of The Memphis File. Boxtown was founded by formerly enslaved people in 1863. By 1975 the city of Memphis was getting sued in federal court for not providing the neighborhood with basic services. By the time xAI showed up, Boxtown was surrounded by a natural gas plant, an oil refinery, a steel mill, and a medical sterilization plant releasing a known carcinogen. Cancer risk was already four times the national average – before xAI. Here are the five real harms every city should worry about when a data center comes to town, and the loophole xAI used to skip every public review.
Read More#1: The Quiet Door: The Concierge Desk, The NDAs, And Who Found Out Last
By the time the Memphis City Council found out Elon Musk was building the world’s largest supercomputer in their city, the deal was already done. The Greater Memphis Chamber held twelve invitation-only meetings, ran a five-person concierge desk for one company, and made fourteen city employees sign NDAs — including the mayor and the utility CEO. Council member Rhonda Logan said it on the record: ‘We don’t know anything. This is already here and we don’t know anything.’ The NDA isn’t protection. The NDA is the corruption.
Read MoreThe Memphis File: This Isn’t A Story About AI. It’s A Story About Corruption.
Anthropic isn’t building a second data center in Memphis. They’re renting compute from xAI’s existing supercomputer. So why does that matter? Because watching everyone panic about the wrong thing made me realize: most people are mad about xAI for the wrong reasons. The villains here aren’t billionaires from Pretoria. They’re local. They’re the people who took the meeting, signed the NDAs, and kept their jobs. This is a corruption story, and over the next ten essays I’m going to walk you through every name, every dollar, and every meeting Memphis didn’t get to attend.
Read MoreEric Trump and Don Jr. Learned the Phone Grift From Their Dad’s Licensing Deals
A Florida shell company took the $59 million in deposits. The Trumps got an undisclosed licensing fee. Same play as Trump Toronto, Trump Panama, Trump SoHo. Ready for some more… Read More
Trump Made AI Data Centers a National Security Issue So Locals Can’t Stop Them
The executive order, the military authority, and the ratepayer scam behind the AI infrastructure boom AI data centers are being treated like military projects when it comes to permits, environmental… Read More
Trump Promised a Free Ballroom and Is Now Charging Taxpayers $1.4 Billion
Trump said the ballroom would cost $200M and zero taxpayer dollars. It’s now $400M from donors with regulatory asks, $400M from a new GOP bill, and $1B in Secret Service money for the bunker underneath. The math got worse every time he opened his mouth.
Read More#10A The Playbook: From Asset to Authoritarian
The Gerasimov Doctrine laid out how to destroy a country without firing a shot. Russian operatives described their idea with Donald Trump – using Cambridge Analytica, WikiLeaks, and hacker groups to manipulate the 2016 election. This is the final act.
Read More#9 The Deal: Trump Tower Moscow and the Biggest Lie of the Campaign
While Trump told voters he had nothing to do with Russia, Michael Cohen was negotiating Trump Tower Moscow with the Kremlin. Felix Sater emailed: Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it.
Read More#8 The International Pipeline: How the Network Took Trump’s Brand Global
Putin’s state bank financed Trump Toronto through a chain of KGB-linked companies. A broker for Trump Panama admitted half his buyers were Russian mafia. Kushner bought property from a Putin-allied oligarch and financed it through Deutsche Bank. Same network, three continents.
Read More#7 The Front Company: How Russian Intelligence Built a Business Inside Trump Tower
Bayrock Group set up shop in Trump Tower, staffed by a Soviet commerce official and a convicted felon turned FBI informant, funded by Kazakh oligarchs, and designed to move Russian money through luxury real estate. 77% of Trump SoHo units were bought with cash by shell companies formed days before purchase. This is the KGB front company playbook with expensive suits.
Read More#6 The Lifeline: Deutsche Bank, Russian Money, and Trump’s Only Option
Every bank in America said no to Donald Trump. But Deutsche Bank – which was simultaneously laundering $10 billion for Russian oligarchs through its Moscow mirror-trading scheme – kept writing checks. Over $2 billion in loans.
Read More