Chris Brunet

Cambridge Professor Found Dead After Rampant Plagiarism and Pattern of Deception

Just published a deep dive overview and analysis of the Jason Arday situation…

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10 days ago · 24 likes · 4 comments · Christopher Brunet

Just hours later, Nathan Cofnas, the postdoc who first brought Jason Arday’s plagiarism allegations to widespread public attention, announced that his own university was investigating him for allegedly discriminating against Arday.

Only a few hours later, Ghent University formally suspended him.

Cofnas said the university would “almost certainly fire me.”

The suspension letter objects that Cofnas called Arday “mentally disabled” and a “worthless scholar,” described his efforts as a “crusade,” and allegedly engaged in a “targeted campaign of professional elimination.”

“The manner in which you publicly presented your role in the allegations concerning the late professor Jason Arday has reinforced concerns among the university’s community that your public interventions seem to develop into targeted campaigns of professional elimination.”

“Furthermore, in several public interviews, you repeatedly referred to the late professor Jason Arday as being ‘mentally disabled’ and made various other disparaging remarks concerning him, including, among others, describing him as a ‘worthless scholar’.”

“By framing your interventions as a ‘crusade’ aimed at the systematic personal and professional destruction of colleagues, you have demonstrated that your actions extend beyond the permissible bounds of academic debate.”

Ghent does not accuse Cofnas of fabricating evidence, forging documents, or making false claims about Arday. Instead, the suspension letter focuses on his tone, motives, and the backlash his reporting provoked: student petitions, staff complaints, more than 100 emails, and claims of psychological distress.

That creates an obvious perverse incentive.

The more successfully activists can generate outrage around a controversial scholar, the stronger the administrative case becomes for removing him. It is a version of the heckler’s veto: enough people object to your presence, therefore your presence itself becomes the problem.

An internal email circulated by a tenured professor in Cofnas’s department makes the situation look even stranger. According to the email, Rector Petra De Sutter had explicitly solicited members of the university community to submit complaints. Classic. Encourage people to complain about an employee, then point to the number of complaints as proof that the employee must be removed.

Cofnas then turned his attention to De Sutter personally, accusing the rector of using AI-generated material containing fabricated quotations in a speech.

This allegation is undeniably true.

What I find amusing is Cofnas’s careful use of the pronoun “she.”

He’s apparently on a crusade for truth, but even while accusing his own rector of dishonesty, he is scrupulously respectful of “her” gender identity.

If we look closer, Petra De Sutter looks suspiciously like a man wearing a wig:

Before transitioning around age 40, Petra De Sutter published professionally as Paul De Sutter, a gynecologist.

De Sutter recounted his transition in the 2016 autobiography Over(leven): mijn strijd als transvrouw, arts & politica (“Surviving: My Struggle as a Trans Woman, Doctor & Politician”).

From a 2016 book review:

In a 2018 TEDx Brussels talk titled “Tele-Babies,” he portrayed gene editing and reproductive technology as a moral imperative, citing eugenicist Julian Savulescu and casting Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” as something to aspire to.

"In the world of Aldous Huxley, procreation is not something that is connected with sexuality or with relationship or family-building anymore. You just go to a clinic or a factory, if you wish, and you give your gametes. After so many months, you can pick up your child, which has been genetically enhanced and designed according to the features that you want."

Very creepy.

The backlash has now gone international.

Today, August 21, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White personally intervened, urging Ghent University to ensure that Cofnas remains employed. The U.S. Embassy denounced the university’s treatment of Cofnas as “scapegoating mob behavior,” and warned that the university’s access to U.S. funding could be at risk.

Good for the Trump administration. If America is going to project its values around the world, academic freedom is a pretty good place to start.

Whatever else you think of Trump, this is a concrete example of how differently his government is willing to use power. It is impossible to imagine a Kamala Harris administration going to the mat for Nathan Cofnas; if anything, the political incentives would have pointed in the opposite direction; they would be twisting the knife in his gut. Instead, the Trump State Department has put the weight of the U.S. government behind an academic whom almost every conventional political actor would regard as too radioactive to defend.

The ball is squarely in the Belgian government’s court.

Your move, Brussels.

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Watch the video I made about this:

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Last month, Political Analysis, the top field journal in political methodology, published a correction:

Dr. Aaron Kaufman, Associate Professor of Political Science, NYU Abu Dhabi, published a “joint class project” completed by two of his students as his own solo paper in this journal. The correction “acknowledges their foundational contribution to the development of the ideas and methods.”

The correction does not add either student as a coauthor. Nor does it explain how a joint student project became Kaufman’s solo-authored publication, or why it took approximately three years to correct.

#2: Cambridge Launches Probe Into My Investigation

Following this investigation into a paper mill at Elsevier:

I have now received word that Dr. Anna Du, one of the paper mill’s ringleaders, is under investigation by both her primary employer (Edinburgh Napier University) as well as by the University of Cambridge, whom she uses as her main and, in fact, only affiliation when trading manuscripts as an Elsevier editor:

Statement from a University of Cambridge spokesperson:

“We have undertaken enquiries in the University and we have not received this complaint before. Anna Min Du is not employed by the University of Cambridge. We are reviewing this matter.”

Statement from a Edinburgh Napier University spokesperson (he/him):

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We will look into it.”

#3: Debate Update

Not really academia-related, but results are in and I won this debate with 78% of the vote:

I am moving on to the next round, and the winner of the tournament gets $5,000.

#4: Northwestern Shuts Down African Studies

Northwestern is shutting down its flagship Program of African Studies, stripping it of its status as a university research center at the end of August.

This comes despite Northwestern being home to the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, the “largest Africana collection in existence.”

In other words, Northwestern spent nearly 80 years building the world’s premier institutions for African scholarship, only to now dismantle it to appease Trump.

#5: Administrator Bloodbath at Harvard FAS

My YouTube channel is still going strong, I have now published 12 videos and gotten this many views on each: 2k, 170k, 7k, 23k, 1k, 4k, 1k, 65k, 4k, 4k, 14k, 10k.

The average is 25k per video. I’m thrilled.

I published this video last week, “Harvard’s PhD Bloodbath”:

After publishing it, Harvard then announced that they were laying off more than 30% of administrators at their Faculty of Arts and Sciences:

#6: Claudine Gay set to Testify in Francesca Gino Trial

Claudine Gay has been ordered to sit for a two-hour deposition in Francesca Gino’s lawsuit:

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At its peak, EJMR really was the beating heart of the economics profession. Beneath the trolling, cruelty, and rampant mental illness, was an extraordinarily useful venue for anonymous discussion of the job market, department politics, hiring rumors, academic scandals, and research misconduct. Important stories routinely surfaced there long before they reached the rest of the profession.

But the site had been dying for years.

According to Google Trends, interest in the site peaked in 2022, the same year ChatGPT was released. Since then, it has become unusable. There were still occasional nuggets of genuinely valuable information, but almost every thread was buried beneath repetitive trolling, automated posts, and obvious LLM-generated spam. Finding anything worthwhile meant digging through pages of garbage. By the time it died, much of what made EJMR useful was already gone. All of the economists who actually wanted to talk about economics had already been driven away by the spam.

Careers were made—and destroyed—on EJMR, mine included. Most famously, it was an EJMR user who emailed me the plagiarism allegations that ultimately helped bring down Harvard president Claudine Gay. Another writer who came up on the forum was Noahpinion, who spent years hanging around EJMR before becoming one of the most successful economics writers in the world.

For all its ugliness, the forum allowed information to escape institutions that had every incentive to keep it contained. Graduate students could talk about abusive advisers. Junior faculty could discuss department politics. Researchers could flag suspicious papers. Job candidates could compare notes about hiring. People who would never attach their names to an accusation against someone at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or Chicago could at least put the information somewhere public.

Now much of that information simply won’t come out. Without an anonymous public forum, uncomfortable allegations and embarrassing facts are far more likely to remain private, controlled by the very people and institutions with the strongest incentives to suppress them.

There will almost certainly never be another EJMR.

The American Economic Association famously spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building EconSpark, an official attempt to usurp EJMR. It went nowhere. Nobody used it, in large part because it was tightly moderated and institutionally sanitized. The AEA had every incentive to protect the profession’s reputation, not to host the kind of anonymous, adversarial discussion that might expose its dysfunction, scandals, or corruption.

The people on /r/academiceconomics seem convinced that some cleaner, friendlier, better-moderated replacement will reign on Reddit. It won’t. The thing that made EJMR valuable was also the thing that made it hated: radical anonymity combined with extremely permissive speech rules. A forum where graduate students can anonymously accuse powerful professors of misconduct will inevitably also contain lies, grudges, trolling, and offensive garbage.

Reddit is structurally hostile to that model. Between sitewide rules, moderators, voting, account bans, and reputational incentives, genuinely controversial, novel, or explosive claims (and especially anything even remotely right-wing) are deleted instantly. Reddit, a tightly sanitized liberal echo chamber, owned by Condé Nast, hates free speech.

EJMR took the opposite approach: let people speak. That was EJMR’s uncomfortable bargain: protecting the freedom to say important things also meant protecting the freedom to say awful and stupid ones.

And in the end, the thing that may have killed EJMR was not censorship but the opposite problem: too much speech that was no longer human. LLMs made it nearly costless to flood an anonymous forum with endless garbage. The old EJMR could survive trolls because trolls at least had to spend time trolling. Once anyone could generate thousands of posts at effectively zero marginal cost, the signal-to-noise ratio collapsed.

The internet is now approaching an impossible tradeoff. Moderate aggressively enough, and you create sterile platforms where the most controversial speech is filtered out before anyone can judge its value. Moderate too little, and bots, spam, and AI-generated sludge make genuine human conversation impossible to find.

That messiness is the price of genuine free speech. Free speech matters precisely because nobody gets to decide in advance which speech will turn out to matter.

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• VOTE: https://www.izivote.com/v/glenn-vs-chris

The debate prompt was: Should Military Service Be Required to Vote?

The moderator is Ryan Mullally, a lawyer. He is a smart and fair guy and I like him a lot, please follow him on X and subscribe to his YouTube channel.

My opponent, Glenn Lawrence, is “an actor, podcast host, producer, and musician who is also known for his strong views on masculinity, relationships, and cultural issues.” He is a military veteran who argues that voting rights should be tied to military service. I defend universal suffrage and the status quo.

Watch:

I was far from perfect — the main reason I entered this tournament was simply to practice my public speaking, and I have a verrrry long way to go — but definitely did a better job than the other guy, who was fucking awful. He was dumb, loud and aggressive, and talked over me, which resulted in me freezing up 2-3 times, but that was something I can improve on with experience.

I think he knew he had a losing argument because for the whole debate he kept trying to shift the debate prompt from “military service” to “national service”.

Let’s walk through it.

Opening Statements

His 5 minute opening statement began with an ad hominem attack in the first sentence, then launched into an argument that voting is not merely a form of self-expression but an exercise of political power over other citizens.

Lawrence then repeatedly retreats from “military service” to the much broader idea of “national service,” implicitly conceding that military service itself has no unique claim. The list he gave as examples of “national service” that should qualify for voting was:

• Law enforcement

• Firefighters

• FEMA / disaster-relief work

• Conservation Corps

• Peace Corps

• He later argues this list should include architects because architects work to make sure “roads don’t collapse.” Setting aside for a minute that architects don’t work on the structural integrity of roads, if you are arguing that working as an architect at a private company qualifies as you to vote in a “Should Military Service Be Required to Vote?” debate, I think you have lost.

• He also argues that surgeons should count. Again, if you are arguing that working a surgeon at a hospital in Vermont qualifies as you to vote in a “Should Military Service Be Required to Vote?” debate, I think you have lost.

So his position is much broader than the debate resolution.

My opening statement centers on constitutional principles, advocating for fair democratic participation while celebrating the vital contributions of everyday hard-working citizens—from farmers to healthcare workers—as the true backbone of the nation. Grounded in the wisdom of Founding Fathers like John Adams and George Washington, I emphasize governance by consent, equal representation for all taxpayers, civilian leadership, individual liberty, and human flourishing.

15 Minute Open Debate

• Opens with a pedantic argument about how society requires drivers licenses in order to drive therefore we should require certification for voting. I argue that rather than mechanical skills like steering/breaking, the analagous situation for voting would be to test voters on e.g. macroeconomics, constitutional law, trade policy.

• I argue that if 95% of society is banned from voting, they will feel disenfranchised and not feel like they have a stake in society.

Glenn: “Adding another prerequisite to vote DOES NOT eliminate 95% of the voting population.”

Chris: “How much does it eliminate?”

Glenn: “It requires a higher standard of entry to do so”

Chris: “Which would eliminate 95% of voters, right?”

Glenn: “No.”

Chris: “Who would it eliminate?”

Glenn: “The people who choose not to serve in the military”

Chris: “Presently that is 95% of the population.”

Glenn: “That’s a choice. They choose not to vote then.”

• I argue that this voting reform would lead to more wars. He argues it would lead to less war.

• He argues you shouldn’t be able to vote unless you have skin in the game and sacrifice for your country. I argue there are many forms of sacrifice.

• I ask how this will impact society:

Chris: How do you think this will make society better? Do you think it will lead to better hospitals? Better schools? Better policy? What specific policy will improve?

Glenn: Yes

Chris: Which specific one?

Glenn: All of them

Chris: You think there would be no negative repercussions from disenfranchising 95% of the population? Which negative repercussions will there be?

Glenn: refuses to answer

• I ask about brain drain

Chris: Do you think brain Drain would be an issue? All the most talented, all the PhDs and scientists, you don’t think they would have the country if they didn’t get to vote?

Glenn: I don’t know why they wouldn't be able to vote. They could join the service

• I ask about blind, deaf, and disabled voters

Chris: What if you’re blind, or have epilepsy? And you want to serve your country but you’re not allowed to?

Glenn: A blind person can still serve

Chris: But somebody with epilepsy can’t serve in the military

Glenn: We can give them waivers. There’s a guy in the military now with no legs.

• He argues for a military draft

Moderator Crossfire

• We argue semantics about the debate prompt and whether “national service” (FEMA, Firefighters, Conservation Corps, Peace Corps, architects, surgeons) count as military service. I argue he is expanding it on purpose because the prompt is so indefensible.

• I argue for universal suffrage, he argues that voting is a privilege

• We argue about the draft

15 More Minutes of Open Debate

I ask him if a left-wing president rises to power, won’t they just choose and shape their own electorate by excluding e.g. unvaccinated, anti-trans, or anti-DEI people from military service, leading to permanent one-party rule?

He argues this can’t happen because “in my time in service I didn’t meet many left-wing people … I didn’t meet many people that were left-wing so I don’t think that would be a problem … I don’t see how [anyone in the military] will ever vote for a left-wing President.”

Chris: I just think you’re underestimating the capacity for a left-wing president. They’re shaping their own electorate, meaning they can pick who their voters are, and I really think that would lead to a one party state. And the right-wing would do the exact same thing. Donald Trump would pick his own electorate, and it would lead to a one-party state … what I am saying is that it would give the government the power to pick their own electorate.

Glenn: I don’t think so.

Chris: I think it’s absurd not to look at history and talk about military juntas, or left-wing Soviet politburos coming to power through the military. Like once they get control of who serves in the military and the military is who votes, it’s a dictatorship basically right away.

Glenn: It’s not a dictatorship. A veteran can vote against it.

Chris: Right but we’re talking about in thee future, like in 10 or 20 years.

Glenn: In the future, in 10 or 20 years from now, there’s going to be veterans. And they may not align with the government in power and they can vote him out.

…

Chris: Do you think that politicians will vote for larger military budgets if the people voting for them were only military?

Glenn: The defence budget would probably increase by some substantial amount … a good benevolent leader is not going to be ruling with an iron fist in one direction

Chris: In every scenario you’re talking about a benevolent perfect leader. But I’m talking about reality, where Kamala Harris could be president, or Bernie Sanders

Glenn: But that’s not reality because Kamala Harris is not president. If we’re going to talk about reality, use reality.

Chris: She’s currently leading the race for primaries to be the contender.

Glenn: She’s probably not going to win.

Chris: So we’re never going to have a left-wing president?

Glenn: If we implement my policy, probably not.

Chris: Right that’s what I’m saying. Your policy is going to lead to a one-party state, basically whoever is in power first gets to shape their electorate forever.

Glenn: No. No. Mine opens up a third-party option. I think your approach is narrow minded.

Chris: I would say that it’s narrow-minded to say that there’s never going to be a left-wing president who will use the weapons that you give them against you. I think it will backfire.

Glenn: Sure, maybe in a hypothetical reality. In reality I don’t see how that is going to happen.

Chris: In reality there is never going to be a left-wing president?

Glenn: It’s possible.

This was one of the funnier exchanges, about whether blind people can serve:

I then argue that the status quo (universal suffrage) is preferable to blowing up western civilization to run the most radical social experiment ever conducted.

Closing Statements

My statement was about the American people rising up to demand freedom, and then I invoke ancient Sparta, Starship Troopers, and end with an argument about Christian morality.

His closing statement is about duty and honor.

I need more practice.

I need your vote to advance to the next round:

• VOTE: https://www.izivote.com/v/glenn-vs-chris

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Then the vultures arrived.

Chris Brunet

The Biggest Winner in Venezuela: Paul “The Vulture” Singer

Coups, collapses, and revolutions are usually framed as moral dramas: heroes and villains, tyrants and liberators, peoples rising against power. What receives less attention is the market for distressed assets that forms in their wake. When states fracture, assets do not vanish. They are liquidated quietly, legally, and at a steep discount. Crisis creat…

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8 months ago · 69 likes · 16 comments · Christopher Brunet

Soon after declaring bankruptcy, “sometime that summer” of 2001, Paul Singer, through two Elliott Management (his hedge fund) subsidiaries (Kensington International and Springfield Associates), became the single largest holder of Owens Corning’s bank debt and began operating as a “movant” in the bankruptcy case , meaning he sought to influence restructuring, settlement, and liquidation decisions.

Singer understood a cold financial truth: cutting the company’s asbestos payouts would immediately raise the value of the bank debt he controlled. In effect, every dollar denied to a sick worker coughing up blood was a dollar transferred directly onto his balance sheet.

To execute this extraction, Singer launched a multi-front campaign spanning courtrooms, Capitol Hill, and public media.

If asbestos workers couldn’t breathe, it’s because the judge was biased.

If asbestos workers couldn’t breathe, it’s because tort laws were wrong.

If asbestos workers couldn’t breathe, it’s because they were lying, vexatious, fraudulent grifters.

By poisoning the well, the narrative shifted public and legal focus away from corporate negligence toward claims of systemic fraud by victims, laying the groundwork for severe restrictions on who could qualify for compensation.

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The Manhattan Institute was contacted for comment prior to publication.

No response was received by the time of publication.

Elliott Management was contacted for comment prior to publication.

No response was received by the time of publication.

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Campaign Against the Judge

Elliott’s first move was to launch a campaign to remove Senior District Judge Alfred M. Wolin from supervising Owens Corning’s asbestos bankruptcy.

Wolin appointed five outside advisers with experience in asbestos litigation to help him manage the cases. Two of those advisers were simultaneously representing asbestos claimants in an unrelated asbestos bankruptcy.

Elliott petitioned the Third Circuit for a writ of mandamus ordering Wolin’s disqualification from the bankruptcy case due to this “conflict of interest.”

Wolin then produced a 102-page opinion refusing to recuse himself, finding no appearance of impropriety, and arguing that the petition had been motivated by strategy rather than ethics.

In May 2004, a divided Third Circuit panel ruled 2–1 in Elliott’s favor and removed Wolin from the Owens Corning bankruptcy. The majority stressed that it had found no actual bias, wrongdoing, unethical conduct, or partisanship by Wolin. It removed him because the advisers’ conflicting roles “created an appearance under which his impartiality could reasonably be questioned.” The dissent argued that no meaningful conflict existed. Contemporary reporting described it as “highly unusual” for financiers to become so directly involved in removing a judge.

Whatever the legal merits, the financial markets understood immediately who had won. Owens Corning’s bank debt jumped by at least ten points, to roughly 75–78 cents on the dollar. Just three weeks earlier, it had traded from the high 50s to the low 60s. The ruling therefore added hundreds of millions of dollars to the expected value of the company’s bank debt—and, on paper, to the value of Paul Singer’s position. Investors were betting that Wolin’s replacement would give greater weight to the claims of bank lenders over bondholders and other creditors.

PR Campaign

A few months after this court victory, Mark D. Brodsky, Elliott’s senior portfolio manager and the executive centrally involved in the Owens Corning strategy, published a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Finally, a Chance to Clean Up the Asbestos Mess” where he presented asbestos bankruptcy as a system distorted in favor of claimants’ lawyers.

Over the following years, asbestos defendants, insurers, creditors, and their political allies developed an elaborate narrative about fraudulent “asymptomatic” claimants. Once dying claimants were smeared as healthy opportunists recruited by crooked lawyers, reducing their compensation could be sold as “tort reform” rather than what it was: a transfer of money away from injured workers and toward corporations, insurers, and distressed-debt investors.

Singer and Elliott Management were among the largest corporate donors to federal political campaigns, political action committees, and conservative policy groups lobbying for this “tort reform.”

That was the trick: turn the people dying from asbestos exposure into the villains of the asbestos scandal.

A central player in this strategy was the Manhattan Institute.

Chris Brunet

How The Manhattan Institute Hired a Porn Star to Infiltrate The Conservative Movement and Channel its Energy into Being Pro-Israel

In October 2024, Christopher F. Rufo’s employer, the Manhattan Institute, gave him a budget to hire 2 full-time investigative journalists reporting directly to him…

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4 months ago · 382 likes · 109 comments · Christopher Brunet

The Manhattan Institute Pushed This Rhetoric

Singer’s relationship with the Manhattan Institute overlapped almost perfectly with Elliott’s battle over Owens Corning.

• October 5, 2000 — Owens Corning enters Chapter 11 bankruptcy under the weight of its asbestos liabilities.

• 2001–2002 — Elliott Management becomes a major holder of Owens Corning’s distressed bank debt.

• May 2, 2002 — The Manhattan Institute launches dedicated programming on asbestos litigation.

• 2003 — Singer begins documented financial support for the Institute. The Paul Singer Family Foundation gives $90,000 to the Manhattan Institute.

• May 2004 — Singer joins the Manhattan Institute’s board, at the height of Elliott’s fight over the Owens Corning bankruptcy.

• 2004 — Singer’s foundation increases its contribution to $150,000.

• May–October 2006 — Owens Corning reaches its restructuring agreement and emerges from bankruptcy.

• February 21, 2008 — Singer becomes chairman of the Manhattan Institute.

Singer-controlled foundations have donated at least $13.5 million to the Manhattan Institute since 2003, according to publicly available tax records.

A search for “asbestos” on the Manhattan Institute’s website returns 102 results, heavily concentrated around the years surrounding the Owens Corning bankruptcy fight. They hosted conferences, published reports, produced commentary, and promoted scholars who repeatedly depicted asbestos plaintiffs as medically unimpaired opportunists, recruited claimants, and outright fraudsters.

Here are just a few examples from the more than 100 asbestos-related articles, reports, and events published or hosted by the Manhattan Institute:

• Asbestos Litigation: Malignancy in the Courts?” (2002)

  • “asbestos law was applied to cases of dubious injury and ultimately to cases . . . with no injury”

  • “Why is asbestos litigation increasing at a time when medical science says it should be decreasing? It is because asbestos litigation today has come to consist, mainly, of non-sick people, suing in jurisdictions where asbestos litigation is one of the main industries supporting the local economy”

• Tort Turns Toxic (2002)

  • “Asbestos litigation is putting many small firms with no history of negligence out of business, destroying jobs and setting dangerous new court precedents.”

  • “the asbestos-litigation plague works its mischief”

  • “the asbestos-litigation whirlwind—reveal the trial lawyers to be not the champions of ordinary Americans, but their exploiters.”

• Understanding Asbestos Litigation: The Genesis, Scope, and Impact (2003)

• Toward Greater Judicial Leadership in Asbestos Litigation (2003)

  • “The sustained boom in asbestos litigation is happening, in large part, because trial lawyers began to actively recruit plaintiffs who, by any reasonable standard, are not sick”

  • '‘asbestos litigation is emerging as a prime threat to job creation”

  • “Owens Corning exhausted its assets and insurance paying claims. It was a very widespread problem”

• The Lawsuit Lobby (2003)

  • “…lawmakers have long made it an annual habit to pass [bills] … the effect of which is variously to increase retroactively the level of [asbestos] damages plaintiffs’ can obtain in pending cases…”

• Courting Stupidity (2003)

  • “With asbestos, and many other mass tort episodes, a rash of arrestingly high verdicts helped educate recalcitrant defendants about the need to pony up substantial settlements.”

• The Great Asbestos Swindles (2003)

  • ““Issue one” for the new Congress should be the rescue of the U.S. economy from [asbestos lawsuits]”

  • “tens of thousands of claimants who were neither sick nor impaired but who won the asbestos lottery when mass x-ray screenings showed collagen deposits -- benign lung abnormalities related to many environmental causes --”

  • “Rampant fraud in asbestos litigation calls for a prosecutorial response.”

• The Seven Myths of Highly Effective Plaintiffs’ Lawyers” (2004)

  • Plaintiffs’ attorneys run thousands of healthy people through medical mills and then enroll them in asbestos lawsuits … from asbestos alone, one could conclude that the tort system in America is dysfunctional in the extreme.

• What Did Those Asbestos X-Rays Really Show? (2005)

  • “Asbestos litigation prevented the creation of 500,000 jobs”

  • “[Asbestos litigation] is a fraudulent scheme so massive as to qualify for entry into the pantheon of such great American frauds as Enron, WorldCom, OPM, Credit Mobilier and Teapot Dome.”

• How a “Loser Pays” Rule Would Improve the American Legal System (2008)

  • “Mass tort litigation, for example, over asbestos, has been exposed as rife with fraud.”

In 2006, Manhattan Institute senior fellow James R. Copland testified before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services.

He said:

In asbestos litigation … those with no cognizable medical injury receive payouts from bankrupt firms and their successor trusts.

These outcomes are unsurprising. Mass tort cases, like asbestos, tend to overwhelm courts and are subject to abuse, even fraud … asbestos dockets are flooded with illegitimate claims

The Manhattan Institute’s Center for Legal Policy published several reports, including this one in 2003, which used the word “asbestos” 67 times and called asbestos litigation the “longest-running mass tort in U.S. history and arguably the most unjust.”

In 2008 they published another 32-page report that used the word asbestos 300 times, “A REPORT ON THE ASBESTOS LITIGATION INDUSTRY.”

That report described:

• Plaintiffs who “aren’t sick”

• Lawyers recruiting “sham victims”

• A “lawsuit assembly line”

• Screening trailers in restaurant, motel, shopping-center and other parking lots

• X-ray vans used to manufacture claims

• Clerical workers preparing diagnoses that doctors allegedly rubber-stamped

• Claims based on “fraud, corrupt experts [and] perjury”

Legislative Lobbying

By 2015, the Manhattan Institute’s talking points had become congressional findings. A House Judiciary Committee report devoted an entire section to asbestos “fraud,” mass recruitment, medically unimpaired claimants, lawsuit assembly lines, free X-rays, and screening vans parked outside union halls, restaurants, and hotels.

The report cited the Manhattan Institute itself as evidence that asbestos defendants needed greater protection from claimants.

It also cited Manhattan Institute scholar Lester Brickman fourteen times—including to support claims explicitly involving Owens Corning, the asbestos manufacturer whose debt Paul Singer had acquired.

Brickman had already played a prominent role in the political campaign for asbestos reform. On January 7, 2005, President George W. Bush introduced him as an asbestos-litigation “expert” during a televised White House event at Macomb Community College.

Singer had personally contributed the legal maximum to Bush and bundled at least $100,000 more for his presidential campaigns.

Standing beside the president, Brickman claimed that, of roughly 850,000 asbestos claimants, “perhaps 600,000” had filed “largely baseless claims.” He alleged that many cases relied on questionable diagnoses and false testimony.

Brickman was a law professor, not a physician.

Journalist Greg Palast claims his asbestos research had been funded by Singer.

The “expert” was not a doctor, but notably, his “research” was partly funded by Paul Singer. And so was Bush. Since the death of Enron’s Ken Lay, Singer and his hedge fund crew at Elliott International have become the top contributors to the Republican National Committee. It’s hard to measure their largesse exactly, because some of that help comes in through the side door.

For example, in 2004, Singer put money behind the “Swift Boat” smear on Bush’s opponent for the presidency, John Kerry. The legal, political, and PR attacks on the dying workers chiseled away the compensation expected to be paid by the asbestos companies, boosting the firms’ net worth. Singer then flipped Corning, selling it for a neat billion-dollar profit.

It’s legal, it’s brilliant, it’s sick, it’s Singer

-Greg Palast, Vulture’s Picnic

More Legislative Lobbying

This wasn’t the first time that the Manhattan Institute had snuck their propaganda into the congressional record. A 2006 Wall Street Journal investigation reported that Elliott was among the hedge funds paying Washington lobbyists for political intelligence concerning proposed asbestos legislation working its way through Congress:

A contemporaneous profile of Elliott describes the firm as “invest[ing] a lot of time, effort and money in Washington, lobbying for “creative” tort reform laws that would help its case.”

“We saw that efforts to find a legislative solution to the asbestos litigation crisis were gaining traction,” said Singer. “We helped to form a financial industry coalition to support these efforts. We’ve tried to be helpful and creative, and we’ve invested a good deal of effort in the endeavour.”

The “creative” coalition Singer was referring to was Financial Institutions for Asbestos Reform, or FIAR, a coalition of hedge funds and other investors with financial stakes in asbestos litigation.

Elliott paid FIAR approximately $80,000 a year in membership fees. In February 2006, FIAR sent Senators Arlen Specter and Patrick Leahy a letter attacking asbestos legislation. Senator Leahy subsequently entered FIAR’s letter into the Congressional Record.

FIAR did not merely lobby Congress; it manufactured an economic rationale for doing so. In October 2003, it commissioned Navigant Consulting economist William O. Kerr to calculate an “asbestos litigation penalty.” Kerr claimed that failing to enact federal reform would cost the economy $2.4 billion and more than 30,000 jobs every year. Those figures were soon repeated on the Senate floor and recycled by tort-reform advocates across the country.

Navigant was not an arms-length academic institution: Federal lobbying records show that Navigant Consulting was registered to lobby for Paul Singer’s Elliott Associates from 2003 through 2006 on tort issues.

The Payoff

By the end of the fight, Elliott had operated on nearly every front. It fought the asbestos claimants in bankruptcy court. It ran a media smear campaign. It helped organize a coalition of financial institutions seeking federal asbestos legislation. And Singer himself acknowledged that Elliott had invested substantial “time, effort and money” lobbying Washington for tort-reform laws that would help its position in Owens Corning.

The stakes had been clear from the beginning. In February 2004, Judge Alfred Wolin wrote that Owens Corning’s bank lenders could recover nearly 100 cents on the dollar if they defeated substantive consolidation, while other commercial and personal-injury claimants stood to receive only fractions of their claims.

The lenders ultimately did even better than that.

Under Owens Corning's final reorganization plan, approximately $1.475 billion in bank claims were classified as unimpaired. The lenders were entitled to cash covering those claims plus default interest and fees. Owens Corning later reported that, when it emerged from bankruptcy on October 31, 2006, it paid approximately $2.405 billion in cash to holders of its prepetition bank debt.

The asbestos victims did not receive comparable treatment. Owens Corning's own bankruptcy disclosure warned that “Nothing approaching full payment” of its present and future asbestos claims was possible. Instead, victims were moved into a trust that assigned claims scheduled values based on eight disease categories and imposed medical and exposure requirements before applying a separate Payment Percentage to the value of each qualifying claim.

Even tens of thousands of victims whose claims had already been settled before the bankruptcy were caught in the new system. When Owens Corning filed Chapter 11, approximately 61,000 completed settlements remained unpaid in whole or in part. Owens Corning subsequently reported that it made virtually no asbestos-related payments throughout the bankruptcy. Under the final plan, those previously resolved but unpaid claims were themselves subject to the trust's Payment Percentage.

The Owens Corning Trust initially set that Payment Percentage at 40 percent.

On June 4, 2009, it slashed it to just 10 percent.

Elliott, meanwhile, had accumulated one of the largest positions in Owens Corning's distressed bank debt. We do not know precisely what Elliott paid for every piece of that debt, but the market prices illustrate the opportunity: Owens Corning bank debt traded at just 51–52 cents on the dollar in March 2001; after Paul Singer prevailed in court, the debt surged to 124–126 cents on the dollar.

Measured from those market prices, Owens Corning's bank debt — owned by Paul Singer — appreciated by roughly 143 percent.

Paul Singer was paid more than in full, while asbestos victims received as little as 10 cents on the dollar of the money they were owed. For many, the years of engineered court delays meant the checks arrived long after they had already died. And throughout the fight, the Manhattan Institute which Paul Singer funded, governed, and ultimately chaired, smeared the dying victims as the problem.

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So today, I turned it into a YouTube video to finally do the story justice and get it the eyeballs it deserves.

I have finally learned how to maintain eye contact with the camera—the teleprompter helps a lot—and I now have an official theme song, which makes its debut at 1:02.

• WATCH THIS VIDEO ON YOUTUBE

  

I am gradually moving away from distributing every YouTube video through Substack. I published several videos last week without emailing them to subscribers. But I am making an exception for this one because this story deserved a much larger audience the first time around.

If you enjoy the video, liking it or leaving a comment on YouTube helps tell the algorithm to push it to a wider audience.

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• chrisbrunet@protonmail.com

Please never email me from your employer’s device or network, and if you require more confidentiality, ask for my Signal.

When I put out that plea, I got a few responses.

This was one of the most interesting documents I received: a preserved copy of confidential referee records that was briefly posted and then promptly scrubbed from the internet:

Schwert Full List Of Jfe Reviewers

648KB ∙ PDF file

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The person who sent it to me was anonymous, but the original provenance is Dr. Bill Schwert, a professor at the University of Rochester who served as Managing Editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, one of the top 3 finance journals in the world, from 1996 through 2021—about 25 years. Through that tenure, he became arguably the single most powerful gatekeeper in academic finance, wielding enormous influence over which research was published, which ideas gained legitimacy, and which scholars’ careers advanced.

When he retired from the profession, he dropped this bombshell list of all 1,941 referees for the JFE from 1994-2020, the number of acceptances, rejections and the total reports they wrote, the acceptance rate, and the average turnaround time in days.

He named each referee by name.

This is remarkable data, and caused an enormous uproar because the referees were furious that their recommendation records had been made public.

The confidential data remained available on SSRN for just 22 days before the paper was quietly revised and the entire section was removed. But I have the original version, and now you have it too, because someone downloaded and preserved it during that short window it was online.

After he posted it, the team of editors replacing him at the JFE put out a statement denouncing the breach of confidential information, writing:

The editors of the JF, RFS, and the incoming editor of the JFE hereby affirm our commitment to never publicly disclose data that could reveal individual referees’ confidential recommendations, or any other confidential information about the editorial process.

The editors of the JF, RFS, and the incoming editor of the JFE further believe that editors are bound by the AFA Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics, sections 6.(d)(5) and 6.(f), as well as the rules for human subjects research, to not publicly disclose such confidential information

Of course, if you are retiring, the “AFA Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics” is completely toothless: it has no power over you whatsoever, and there are no meaningful repercussions for violating it. So, hilariously, Schwert could burn it all down and expose decades of other people’s confidential referee records on his way out the door, while the profession he had dominated for 25 years was left with little recourse beyond issuing an indignant statement and quietly deleting the evidence.

Schwert’s motivations remain unknown.

To read the breakdown of the data, including the 8 most hostile reviewers in finance (and my exchange with the professor who went 0-for-61), upgrade to a paid subscription.

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Basic Findings

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Yes, it is a funny inside joke, but this is not merely a story about one absurd regression variable. This episode has become shorthand for corruption and exemplifies much of what is wrong with academic prestige, data misconduct, and the incentives at play in the finance job market: who is scrutinized, who is protected, and how serious errors can disappear if your advisor has a Nobel Prize.

What makes it so striking is the gap between the error and the status of the scholar involved. At best, using log(NAICS) was an elementary econometric mistake. At worst, it’s outright fraud. Either way, the person at the center of this scandal now teaches econometrics at Harvard.

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The “official account” holds that Russian military intelligence hacked the DNC, stole thousands of emails, and transferred them to WikiLeaks to influence the presidential election. That claim became the central pillar of Russiagate.

The “conspiracy theory”—examined in Parts 1 and 2—is that the emails were not remotely hacked at all, but leaked by an insider, possibly Seth Rich.

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Any serious attempt to distinguish between those accounts must confront the strange figure who appeared immediately after the DNC announced its breach: “Guccifer 2.0.”

Who is Guccifer 1.0?

“Guccifer” — a portmanteau of “Gucci” and “Lucifer” — is the handle of an infamous Romanian hacker and taxi driver, Marcel Lehel Lazăr, who has pulled off several high-level hacks in the U.S. and Romania.

The actual Guccifer 1.0 was in jail in Virginia from 2016-2021 for several counts of unauthorized access and identity fraud.

One of Guccifer 1.0’s claims to fame is hacking Clinton’s private emails in 2013.

The new hacker’s moniker, Guccifer 2.0, is therefore an homage to Guccifer 1.0, because the new Guccifer is purporting to carry on Guccifer’s legacy of hacking Hillary Clinton. But Guccifer 1.0 and Guccifer 2.0 are completely different people.

Guccifer 2.0 Takes The Credit

On June 14, 2016, the Washington Post reported that the DNC had been hacked.

The next day, June 15th, a hacker calling himself ‘‘Guccifer 2.0’’ claims responsibility for the hack and announces he’ll be giving the documents to Wikileaks, releasing many online himself.

The following day, much of the mainstream media ran with this ‘‘lone hacker’’ narrative:

6 days later, in a Vice interview, Guccifer 2.0 claims to be a lone wolf “hacker, manager, philosopher, women lover … I also like Gucci! I bring the light to people. I’m a freedom fighter! So u can choose what u like!”

Trump surrogate Roger Stone — who I consider one of the least trustworthy sources of news in the world — claimed he exchanged private messages with Guccifer 2.0: “Guccifer 2.0 is the real deal … Guccifer 2.0 made a fateful and wise decision. He went to Wikileaks with the DNC files and the rest is history. Now the world would see for themselves how the Democrats had rigged the game.”

For the next couple of years, many mainstream outlets frequently referred to Guccifer 2.0 simply as “the hacker”:

This narrative would soon prove to be fake. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now categorically say that Guccifer 2.0 was a misinformation operation.

Deliberately Planted Russian Fingerprints?

If this was a Russian intelligence operation, it was the sloppiest in history. Guccifer 2.0 conspicuously left behind a trail of amateurish breadcrumbs pointing directly to Russia. Rather than masking its origins, the operation appeared almost engineered to advertise “Made In Russia” labels on the data.

1. Fox News immediately claimed that “fingers point to Russia” because the leaked documents from Guccifer 2.0 were edited on a computer using the name “Felix Dzerzhinsky.” Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka and a symbol of Soviet intelligence, has been dead for over 90 years— the GRU even have a statue of him outside its headquarters. But if you’re a Russian spy running a covert op, why would you label your files with the name of the most infamous figures in your country’s intelligence history? If I found a document last modified by a user named “James Bond,” I wouldn’t assume it came from British intelligence. Yet that’s exactly what much of the U.S. media did: they took this satirical clue at face value and cited it as proof of Russian hacking.

2. The documents that Guccifer 2.0 created had metadata in Russian, Russian stylesheet entries, and Russian error messages… all of which were inserted for seemingly no reason. Guccifer 2.0 wrote in Cyrillic and used Russian )))))) smileys.

3. Guccifer 2.0’s accounts on Twitter and WordPress revealed their IP address as Russian intelligence headquarters building.

These clues were glaring and discovered immediately, making this appear less like a genuine slip-up and more like a clumsy attempt to frame Russia. This metadata is examined in detail in the excellent forensic investigation, Guccifer 2.0 - Game Over.

Contradicting these clues that Russia did it, there were also many clues that someone in an American timezone did it:

The operation left US breadcrumbs behind in the form of timezone indicators (reported on: here, here, here, here, here, here and here). There are, in fact, more types of timezone indicator pointing at the persona’s activities being in American timezones than Russian. However, they were generally more obscure and took a lot longer to find that the Russian breadcrumbs.

There are also locale indicators in some pieces of evidence that conflict with accompanying Russian indicators and that would be correct for a computer configured for US locale (decimal separator conflicting with Russian language and date format conflicting with Russian timezone offset).

Deliberately Planted DNC Fingerprints?

When Guccifer 2.0 released his first documents, reporters immediately noticed that the metadata identified the author of the first three files as Warren Flood. Flood was a Democratic data strategist who had worked for the DNC and Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.

Thousands of people online took this as proof that Guccifer 2.0 was Warren Flood.

This was misdirection.

The substantive contents of Guccifer 2.0’s first document came from a December 2015 opposition-research file titled “12192015 Trump Report — for dist.docx.”

But Guccifer 2.0 did not simply publish that file. Someone appears to have copied its contents into a second, much older document: a 2008 Obama-transition file titled “Slate — Domestic — USDA — 2008-12-20.doc.” That document had originally been created under the author name “Warren Flood” on a copy of Microsoft Word registered to “GSA.” It was also attached to an entirely separate email in Podesta’s inbox. That email and the 2008 attachment can be viewed here.

The Forensicator blog reconstructed the process by comparing the documents’ metadata, formatting and internal revision identifiers. Their analysis found that the 2008 USDA document supplied the “Warren Flood” author field, the “GSA” company field, the footer and the underlying “CONFIDENTIAL DRAFT” watermark. Whoever constructed Guccifer 2.0’s document apparently emptied that older file, removed “DRAFT” from the watermark, altered the footer and pasted in the contents of the 2015 Trump report. The resulting template was then reused to produce Guccifer 2.0’s second and third documents.

Only afterward were the files saved under the Russian-language username “Феликс Эдмундович”—Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky—and processed using Russian language settings. Guccifer 2.0’s first three files therefore contain two different layers of metadata: an inherited American author name from a 2008 document followed by conspicuous Russian identifiers introduced during their later construction.

This means that Warren Flood’s name is not evidence that Flood personally created the Guccifer 2.0 documents, nor does it prove that his computer was used... Flood’s name survived because someone used his old file as a template.

The Documents Don’t Add Up

The Forensicator reviewed 175 documents Guccifer 2.0 uploaded between June 15 and October 4, 2016. This chart shows the cumulative documents published:

The more revealing chart traces those documents to other collections that later became public. Much of the material was recycled from earlier breaches. Some appear to have originated in the Podesta emails or an earlier Clinton Foundation breach, while others—such as documents concerning misuse of TARP funds—had already been reported by OpenSecrets in 2009. Guccifer 2.0 nevertheless presented them to journalists as newly stolen from the DNC. Nearly half of the documents can be traced to the DCCC rather than the DNC.

Another unresolved discrepancy is that Guccifer 2.0 described his archive as roughly 1 GB, while the complete WikiLeaks DNC collection (44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments) was approximately 2 GB when compressed.

The Method of Hacking Doesn’t Add Up

Guccifer 2.0 claimed he hacked the DNC using a “0-day exploit of NGP-Van”.

“I used 0-day exploit of NGP VAN soft then I installed shell-code into the DNC server. it allowed me to intrude into DNC network. They have Windows-based domain architecture. then I installed my Trojans on several PCs. I had to go from one PC to another every week so CrowdStrike couldn’t catch me for a long time. I know that they have cool intrusion detection system. But my heuristic algorithms are better.”

— Guccifer 2.0 in an interview to Vice News

On the surface, this sounds impressively technical. Under scrutiny, however, it reads more like a collection of hacking buzzwords strung together.

NGP VAN was not software running locally on the DNC’s Windows servers. It was a web-based platform hosted by an outside company and used by Democratic campaigns to manage voter information. Exploiting a vulnerability in NGP VAN might conceivably have exposed information stored inside that platform, but it would not automatically provide shell access to the DNC’s internal network, much less allow an attacker to install Trojans across multiple DNC computers.

Hacking NGP VAN and hacking the DNC’s Windows domain would have been two separate operations requiring separate access. It would be like exploiting a vulnerability in Salesforce and claiming that this automatically allowed you to install malware on every computer belonging to one of Salesforce’s customers.

The only publicly documented NGP VAN vulnerability resembling what Guccifer 2.0 described was the permissions bug involved in the December 2015 Bernie Sanders campaign controversy. That bug temporarily allowed authorized campaign users to view certain information belonging to another campaign. It did not permit remote code execution, provide access to the underlying operating system or allow anyone to install malware on DNC computers.

Guccifer 2.0 told Vice that he first entered the DNC “last summer,” meaning the summer of 2015. But the NGP VAN permissions bug was introduced through a software update on December 16, 2015—months after his purported intrusion began. Cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect examined these contradictions and concluded that Guccifer 2.0’s NGP VAN story “[didn’t] make any sense.”

Guccifer Claims His Source Was Seth Rich

The Guccifer 2.0 hacker ran a (now suspended) “Guccifer_2 Twitter account, where in August 2016 he repeatedly flirted with the actress Robbin Young,

In this private conversation, Guccifer 2.0 claimed that Seth Rich was his source — despite publicly claiming he obtained his material by hacking the DNC.

This claim never made much sense and provides little evidentiary value.

An infamous hacker was casually disclosing sensitive details about his dead whistleblower to some random actress chick to impress her? My interpretation is that this is misdirection, trolling, or narrative-seeding to sow chaos and poison the well… not a credible admission.

In the same conversation Guccifer 2.0 mused that Julian Assange “may be connected with Russians”:

The exchange further damages Guccifer 2.0’s credibility. In different contexts, the persona advanced mutually incompatible stories:

• Publicly, Guccifer claimed to have personally hacked the DNC.

• Privately, he allegedly called Seth Rich “my whistleblower.”

• Here, he casts suspicion on Assange as possibly connected to Russia.

• Meanwhile, U.S. investigators later alleged that Guccifer 2.0 itself was operated by Russian intelligence.

If the official Russian intelligence attribution is correct, this reads like deliberate distancing: a Russian-operated persona privately accusing Assange of Russian connections to reinforce the impression that Guccifer was independent of Moscow.

The Story Doesn’t Add Up

On the day he claimed credit, June 15, 2016, Guccifer 2.0 stated that it had given material to WikiLeaks and asserted that the organization would publish that material soon. However, the earliest recorded communication between Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks—as later disclosed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s July 2018 indictment of 12 Russian GRU officers—did not occur until June 22, 2016.

WikiLeaks says it had no prior contact with Guccifer 2.0.

This chronological gap creates a glaring paradox:

• June 12, 2016: Julian Assange appears on British television (ITV) and publicly announces that WikiLeaks has incoming emails related to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party scheduled for publication.

• June 15, 2016: Guccifer 2.0 makes his public debut, claiming he has already transferred the stolen DNC files to WikiLeaks.

• June 22, 2016: WikiLeaks initiates their very first private contact with Guccifer 2.0 via Twitter direct messages.

• July 14, 2016: Guccifer 2.0 finally transmits an encrypted 1 GB data file to WikiLeaks.

If WikiLeaks was already preparing to publish the material prior to June 12, Guccifer 2.0 could not have been the original source who provided it. Furthermore, Guccifer’s June 15 public claim of having already handed the documents over to WikiLeaks was demonstrably false at the time he made it.

At minimum, this chronology leaves Guccifer 2.0’s June 15 claim unexplained, and heavily points toward the conclusion that Guccifer 2.0 was not the original pipeline to WikiLeaks. The persona appeared after WikiLeaks already possessed the documents, inserting itself into the narrative after the fact to claim responsibility for a breach that had already taken place.

What the Transfer Speeds Can—and Cannot—Prove

A Good American is an excellent documentary about William Binney, the former NSA technical director and one of the most accomplished intelligence analysts of his generation. Although the film does not examine the Guccifer 2.0 case specifically, it provides essential background on Binney’s extraordinary technical abilities and career. His résumé already speaks for itself: no one rises to become technical director of the NSA without possessing exceptional technical talent.

Binney remains the most prominent intelligence insider arguing that the official Guccifer 2.0 narrative is a technical impossibility. His core thesis was first detailed in a Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) memorandum:

• Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence

Independent cyber-investigators have now completed the kind of forensic work that the intelligence assessment did not do … They found that the purported “hack” of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else. Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for example) by an insider.

The key technical evidence in that open letter is that someone “copied 1,976 MegaBytes of data in 87 seconds onto an external storage device. That speed is much faster than what is physically possible with a hack.”

This interview directly presents Binney’s argument:

This is a longer interview in which Binney elaborates at length about how the material was transferred to a thumb drive or CD-ROM and physically transported:

Binney then did an AMA on Reddit where he explained :

Remember when emails released by Wikileaks proved that the DNC rigged the primary election against Bernie Sanders? And everyone claimed that the Russians had hacked the DNC?

There’s only one problem. There was no hack.

It was an internal leak.

Here’s my proof

It boils down to these three key points:

1.) The modification times on the files point to the use of a FAT file system, which is used almost exclusively by storage devices (such as flash drives).

2.) Analysis of the files released by Guccifer 2.0 -- claimed to be the Russian hacker who got the files to Wikileaks -- reveals that they were created at a data transfer rate consistent with a flash drive, but not with an internet transfer.”

3.) The NSA would’ve known the hack was taking place, thanks to the leaks revealed by Edward Snowden, which the NSA has never denied

…

The Guccifer 2.0 data was actually too fast to be consistent with an internet hack.

Reddit moderators shut that thread down almost immediately.

I emailed Binney to ask whether any new evidence, technical analyses, or counterarguments have emerged in the past 8 years that have caused him to revise or qualify his conclusion. He replied:

All the factual evidence supports an internal download of the DNC emails posted by Wikileaks.

1. The transfer rates between 19 and 49.1 mega bytes (million characters) per second can not be supported by the WWW.

2. All 35813 DNC emails posted by Wikileaks have a last modified time ending in an even second. This is a property of FAT (File Allocation Table) format which is a function of the program reading data to a storage device like a thumb drive then physically transported before Wikileaks published. Podesta email could have been a hack but not the DNC emails.

3. Our English collaborators found 5 Guccifer 2.0 email that had Russian fingerprints - in the Wikileaks posted data, the same 5 did not have Russian fingerprints. So, Guccifer 2.0 put them there.

4. All these facts are consistent with Shawn Henry’s (CSO of Crowd Strike) testimony to HPSCI (Jan 2017) where he said: they observed the data was prepared for exfiltration but they did not see it exfiltrated. Here I assume he is referring to the last modified times.

5. Proof of an inside job is also consistent with statements from Sy Hersh, Craig Murry, Kim Dot Com and Julian Assange.

I would also point out that no one (including NSA, CIA, FBI) has produced any evidence (they only have opinion) to contradict these facts. They are going with the emotion TDS plus trading their integrity for money. Plus they called me a conspiracy theorist when in fact, they don’t know the difference between a theory and a theorem. They did get a lot of awards and money out of all those lies.

Bill

A subsequent investigation, The Need for Speed, again concludes that “a transfer rate of 23 MB/s is estimated for this initial file collection operation. This transfer rate can be achieved when files are copied over a LAN, but this rate is too fast to support the hypothesis that the DNC data was initially copied over the Internet (esp. to Romania).”

Other independent investigators, such as Guccifer Game Over, who are still skeptical of the official “Russia hacked the DNC” narrative, are more cautious in their analysis of the data transfer speeds:

Another skeptical voice of the thumb drive theory is Stephen McIntyre:

Conclusion

Guccifer 2.0 was not a lone wolf in Romania.

Two years after he appeared, the CIA, NSA, and FBI assessed “with high confidence” that “Russian military intelligence used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release US victim data.” Mueller identified two people behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona, both officers of the GRU. This Russian narrative is somewhat more plausible than the lone wolf in Romania theory. The hacker left far more clues pointing toward a Russian identity than toward the Romanian persona he publicly claimed. If Guccifer 2.0 was a GRU psychological operation, lying, trolling (like claiming Seth Rich was the source to Robbin Young), and dropping sloppy clues is standard tradecraft for disinformation.

But there is a third possibility: the incident was a leak deliberately made to look like a hack, and Guccifer 2.0 was a domestic influence operation intended to discredit WikiLeaks and divert attention from the substance of the DNC emails. For the next three years, the mainstream press became obsessed with Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russians, while devoting little attention to what the leaked emails revealed about the Democratic establishment’s efforts to undermine Bernie Sanders’s campaign.

None of this, by itself, establishes who controlled Guccifer 2.0.

That leaves the central question unresolved: who actually created Guccifer 2.0, and on what evidence did the press and intelligence establishment conclude that the persona was Russian? To answer that, we have to turn to CrowdStrike—the private cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC, whose analysis became the foundation for the entire hacking narrative.

My next article, Part 4 in this series, will examine what CrowdStrike actually found, what it never proved, and how its conclusions came to be treated as settled fact.

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And turned it into this:

I’m being told that I need to buy a teleprompter from Amazon.

I have studio lights and a 4k camera on the way.

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An expansion of this magnitude is difficult to understand as anything other than preparation for a potential World War, an enormous windfall for the military-industrial complex, or some combination of the two.

But the broader military buildup is not the focus of this article. Instead, I am examining a specific provision in the new defense budget bill known as the “United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” (USITCI).

The USITCI appeared as Section 224 in earlier versions of the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but has since been renamed as Section 219.

If you are extremely online, you have probably already heard about this.

Perhaps you saw Dennis Kucinich discussing it with Tucker:

Or perhaps you saw it on someone else’s Substack:

DEEPER LOOK with Michael Sellers

Uproar Builds Over Proposed Unprecedented U.S.-Israel Military, Defense Tech Integration

At a time when American public opinion toward Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu has turned sharply negative, a new uproar is building over a little-noticed provision in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act…

Read more

3 months ago · 97 likes · 20 comments · Michael Sellers

Wajeeh Lion

Sovereign Surrender: The Erasure of the U.S.-Israeli Military Boundary

The global geopolitical architecture and the established paradigms of bilateral military cooperation have ruptured. Following a twenty-four-month period where the Middle East transitioned from a theater of proxy engagements into a zone of high-intensity, state-on-state conventional warfare, the United States defense establishment has fundamentally alter…

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3 months ago · 294 likes · 41 comments · Wajeeh Lion

Insight to Incite: Open Source Intelligence Analysis

Section 224: Congress's Secret Plan to Merge the U.S. Military With Israel

AIPAC and Israel-First politicians know that with support for Israel at an all-time low, renegotiating the 3.8 billion they get annually from the American taxpayers might not go well. Their solution? Merge the two militaries’ R&D, give Israel equal ownership and access to emerging tech, and place Israeli War Industries in every congressional district in America to force our representatives to answer to Tel Aviv. In the future, defunding the IDF will require defunding the U.S. Armed Services. This “gift” to Israel is worth more than every fighter jet, warship, and aircraft carrier in the American fleet, combined. And worse yet, it will make pleasing Israel a priority for every member of Congress…

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3 months ago · 67 likes · 3 comments · JD Hall

But if you rely on mainstream media, there is a good chance you have not heard about it at all, and on the rare occasion it has received mainstream coverage, it has been framed as a good thing.

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Origins

Today’s legislation is the culmination of a decades-long effort.

• 2020–2022. Congress authorized the creation of the United States–Israel Operations-Technology Working Group, whose purpose was “to identify military capability requirements common to the Department of Defense and the Ministry of Defense of Israel.”

• 2023: Congress attempted to expand this model through the United States–Israel Future of Warfare Act, which would have created a dedicated United States–Israel Future of Warfare Research and Development Fund.

• 2024: Pentagon establishes a partnership between the Defense Innovation Unit and its Israeli counterparts.

• 2025: The United States–Israel Defense Partnership Act sought to create a permanent Defense Innovation Unit office in Israel.

• 2025–2026: The FY2026 budget created a United States–Israel Defense Industrial Base Working Group with the mandate to “identify opportunities for deeper integration between the American and Israeli defense industries.”

The various strands were finally pulled together on February 12, 2026, with the introduction of the United States–Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security Act—the FUTURES Act.

The FUTURES Act proposed establishing a new United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative that would fold in Israeli technology to American military systems and coordinate activities across the Pentagon.

Senators Ted Budd and Kirsten Gillibrand introduced the Senate version, while Representatives Ronny Jackson and Don Davis introduced the House bill.

Neither the House nor Senate version of the FUTURES Act advanced out of committee… instead, the bill was folded almost verbatim into today’s budget, as the USITCI.

Is it Really a “Merger”?

Zionists will insist that the USITCI is not ~*technically*~ a merger, merely an expansion of military cooperation and a major step toward permanent integration.

Defenders compare this arrangement to standard NATO or AUKUS interoperability. But USITCI would establish a dedicated Pentagon Executive Agent charged with synchronizing, expanding and accelerating U.S.–Israel research, development, testing, integration and industrial cooperation. Under Pentagon rules, that agent’s assigned responsibilities would take precedence over those of other Defense Department component heads, giving it unusual authority to push Israeli technology through the department.

That semantic distinction is impossible to sustain.

Read the text of the bill for yourself:

• https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8800/text

The bill directs the Pentagon and the Israeli Ministry of Defense to “align efforts and avoid duplication.”

That is the basic logic of any merger: eliminate overlapping functions, coordinate investments and divide responsibilities across a single integrated system.

If Exxon merged with Chevron, the combined company would not maintain two separate accounting departments merely to preserve the appearance of independence. It would consolidate “duplicated” functions. The same principle is at work here. The Pentagon and the IDF will now “avoid duplication” in:

• manufacturing

• missile defense

• Space Command

• drone fleets

• directed energy

• quantum computing

• artificial intelligence

• cyber warfare

• biotechnology

  • Of particular concern is the listing of “biotechnology, biomanufacturing, and medical defense” as an area for joint research, given Israel’s failure to join the Biological Weapons Convention and longstanding rumors of an active biological weapons program on its part; information-sharing within this domain may breach US commitments under Article III of the Convention.

• the overly broad category of “other Department of Defense entities, as appropriate”

The merger becomes even more explicit when the bill turns to “network integration” and “data fusion.” Satellites, drones, radar systems, intelligence databases and battlefield sensors will now all be designed to exchange and process data across a unified architecture — hence the word: “fusion.” There won’t be Israeli or American satellites, there will simply be ”fused” satellites.

A military that depends upon another country’s missiles, satellites, technology, data, factories, supply chains and drones is no longer operating independently in any meaningful sense. It has merged into one component of a larger system.

Deeper integration also means weaker oversight and less accountability. As personnel and systems become increasingly intertwined, it becomes harder to determine who is making which decisions, or even where American authority ends and Israeli authority begins. This gives Netanyahu undue influence over when, where, and how American military power is used.

Separately, it extends through 2029 an existing authority allowing the U.S. to transfer weapons already stored in its War Reserve Stockpile in Israel. That authority permits transfers without Congress voting on each shipment.

Co-Production and “Buy America” Bypasses

When the United States provides military aid to Israel, the standard defense is that the money supports American jobs because Israel is required to spend it on U.S.-made weapons.

But Israel already enjoys unusually favorable access to Pentagon procurement:

• Historically, Israel enjoyed a unique exemption under Foreign Military Financing (FMF) called Off-Shore Procurement (OSP), allowing many Israeli defense products to receive exemptions from the Buy American statute.

• Under the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS 225.872-1), Israel is explicitly designated as a "qualifying country", which grants exemptions from Buy American Act restrictions.

USITCI would deepen that subversion by helping Israeli-origin technologies move into American procurement programs. A weapon could now be assembled in a U.S. factory and marketed as American-made, even when the underlying factory, workers, technology, intellectual property, and profits belong to an Israeli company. USITCI would therefore undermine the competitiveness of the American private sector.

From Aid to Partnership

The U.S. has given Israel hundreds of billions of dollars in direct military aid over the past few decades.

People are upset about that. So upset, that 60% of Americans now oppose sending arms to Israel, and 75% of Americans under 30 have unfavorable views of the country.

Faced with that backlash, pro-Israel influencers have recently coordinated to push a new damage-control line: “Fine—cut off the aid. We don’t want it anyway.”

The one leading this narrative is actually Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

Netanyahu is saying: “Keep your $3.8 billion. Let’s just merge our militaries instead.” He’s willing to walk away from a few billion in foreign aid if it means gaining a massive foothold into a $1.5 trillion pile of money. On June 1st, 2026, he put this plan in writing, sending a letter to Indiana Congressman Marlin Stutzman explicitly calling it “my plan to shift the framework from aid to partnership”:

Netanyahu then went on Fox News where he said “I'm calling it from aid to partnership … the meshing of our two great countries would strengthen the military battlefield in many important ways.”

The Congressional Calculus

An amendment was introduced last month by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), supported by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), that would have stripped the USITCI from the House version of this bill.

It was rejected.

Or, more accurately, Khanna & Massie’s amendment was never even allowed to come to a vote. It was never allowed to reach the House floor. The House Rules Committee declined to make it in order, preventing any floor debate or vote. Nor did the amendment receive substantive consideration in committee.

Below are the members of the Rules Committee that blocked the amendment from receiving a vote. The committee is chaired by 83-year-old Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC):

On July 23, 2026, the House passed the NDAA by a narrow 216–212 vote. The result fell largely along party lines, with a handful of defections:

• 6 Democrats voted YES along with 210 Republicans

• 7 Republicans voted NO along 205 Democrats

The House will likely vote once more after its version is reconciled with the Senate bill in conference. Barring an unexpected development, however, the House outcome appears largely settled.

The more difficult battle will be in the Senate.

The Senate Calculus

Republicans hold 53 Senate seats. Assuming every Republican votes yes, they will need at least seven Democrats to reach the 60-vote cloture threshold required to advance the bill.

Senate Democrats already blocked the bill once last week:

Republicans responded by bundling the NDAA with the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

By bundling these two bills together, Republicans are effectively issuing an ultimatum: if you want voter ID, you must also accept the merger of the Pentagon and the IDF. It is a cynical attempt to bully fiscal or Israel-skeptical conservatives into supporting a bloated, Israel-designed defense bill by branding anyone who votes against it as an opponent of voter ID.

Expect the Senate battle to continue for several months as Republican leaders negotiate with Democrats and holdouts within their own party. There is little urgency to reach an immediate agreement: Congress rarely sends the final NDAA to the president before November. The chart below shows when the NDAA has passed in previous years:

Prediction markets currently expect the bill to pass in December.

Conclusion: Treason

The billions Israel already receives in direct military assistance are at least visible. Congress appropriates the money, the press can identify it and the public can oppose it. This bill would replace that visible pipeline with something far more dangerous: a gateway into the entire Pentagon budget. What is now counted as foreign aid could be scattered across weapons programs, research contracts, procurement accounts and joint military initiatives until no one can say where American defense spending ends and Israeli subsidy begins.

The arrangement is being smuggled through Washington inside a bill approaching a thousand pages. There was no standalone vote. The amendment that would have removed it was not even permitted to reach the floor. Meanwhile, America’s supposedly adversarial press has responded with near-total silence. If this provision were genuinely defensible, its architects would defend it in public. Instead, they are counting on Americans never discovering that it exists.

A government that quietly subordinates its military resources to the interests of a foreign state has betrayed the people it governs. Its defenders can call it cooperation, interoperability or strategic integration. The honest word is treason.

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I just released a new investigation, and I’d love your support once again. Please give it a watch, and consider liking or commenting to juice the algorithm:

I’m still learning how to make videos, and there is plenty of room to improve. I need a professional camera, better lighting, and eventually a proper set. But the massive success of the first video proved that the concept works.

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It would mean a lot if you subscribed over on YouTube.

The plan is simple: I have a backlog of hundreds of Substack investigations, and I’m turning the strongest ones into videos.

This is the first.

Thoughts? Constructive criticism?

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Parts 3, 4, & 5 are coming soon, I promise, I am still working on them, it’s a ton of research.

Part 3 will about Crowdstrike / Guccifer.

Part 4 will be about Russiagate / Crossfire Hurricane.

Part 5 will be about the ongoing FBI coverup.

In the meantime, there was a new development in the Seth Rich case yesterday!!

After 10 years of fighting the courts, finally, there is movement:

I joined Benny Johnson this morning to discuss these updates. He has 6.1 million subscribers on YouTube, so this was easily the biggest platform I’ve been on so far. I clipped the segment and uploaded it to my own channel — finally, I have some YouTube content:

I uploaded it on X, too, if you could consider retweeting it, that would be great:

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In 2024, Acrisure hired John Tuttle, the former vice chairman and global head of listings at the New York Stock Exchange, as its president. Tuttle had previously worked on more than 1,300 equity offerings.

In 2025, Acrisure raised $2.1 billion in convertible senior preferred stock through a funding round led by Bain Capital, valuing the company at $32 billion. The financing was explicitly structured around a future IPO.

As Acrisure prepared itself for Wall Street, it eliminated thousands of American jobs—and repeatedly blamed artificial intelligence and automation.

Dozens of mainstream news articles uncritically accepted this explanation at face value, parroting Acrisure’s line that they are an AI-powered fintech innovator whose AI prowess had rendered their American workforce obsolete.

My investigation points to a far more conventional explanation: Acrisure is shifting work once performed by American employees to lower-cost operations in India, the Philippines, and Colombia.

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The word for this is “AI washing.” Much like “greenwashing,” AI washing allows companies to wrap conventional corporate behavior in the language of technological progress. Instead of admitting that jobs are being eliminated because the work can be performed more cheaply overseas, executives describe the cuts as an unavoidable consequence of artificial intelligence.

For a company preparing to go public, the AI narrative is far more attractive. “We outsourced thousands of jobs to India” sounds like conventional cost-cutting. “We used artificial intelligence to transform our workforce” sounds like innovation, and encourages investors in the IPO to value the company as a fintech platform rather than merely another insurance broker.

I reached out to Acrisure for comment:

An Acrisure spokesperson repeatedly told me they would answer my questions, and then only provided the following bland statement:

Next, I reached out to Michigan state Rep. Josh Schriver, who represents the 66th House District. He provided me with the following statement:

Representative Josh Schriver

Official Updates from Representative Josh Schriver (MI-66)

By Staff - Joe

The First Round of Layoffs

Eight months ago, Acrisure announced 400 initial layoffs in their accounting department, citing advances in “technology” and ”automation” and “AI.”

Acrisure is headquartered in Grand Rapids, and, immediately, Acrisure employees on the r/grandrapids, /Accounting, r/InsuranceAgent subreddits began grumbling about the *real* reason:

The same grumblings appeared on TikTok, LinkedIn, and Facebook:

On Glassdoor and Indeed, ex-Acrisure employees told the same story via reviews:

“The people who were leaving due to AI were expected to train the India team.”

“They claim AI, but lots of roles have been offshored to places like India.”

“I was training contractors to take my job then finally laid off.”

“Stop laying people off because of “AI” when you’re just offshoring the work.”

“It feels like they’re trying to get people to leave so they can be replaced with contract workers.”

“Told we’re being laid off due to AI. Being forced to train our own replacements from India before we’re fired.”

“…outsourcing…”

“They are outsourcing too many jobs, destroying morale and efficiency.”

“They decided to outsource to a company in India that allegedly will build AI to do the work in order to save money but the outsourced company will only be able to automate a fraction of the work.”

“There is no amazing “fintech”. It is smoke and mirrors.”

“I’ll be glad to quit this embarrassment of a “fintech” company".

“Not even remotely close to being a Fintech.”

These quotes are especially damning for a company that describes itself in the first line of their “About” page as a “fintech leader” in preparation for an IPO.

Still, anonymous employee reviews are not conclusive.

I need a smoking gun.

Let’s start with a recent job posting for “Specialist - Cash App & Receivables” :

The job duties mention “offshore accounting delivery teams” 6 times:

• This role works closely with their peers, our Accounting automation partner/offshore delivery team

• Serve as the primary onshore escalation point for Operations staff and offshore delivery teams

• coordinating with offshore leads

• Develop and maintain strong relationships with Accounting automation partner/offshore delivery team

• Works closely with offshore delivery teams

We can now be sure that Acrisure’s accounting unit was offshored.

When a company prepares to offshore a department, the overseas workers do not yet possess the institutional knowledge required to perform the specific, day-to-day tasks of the Americans they are replacing. Software can be deployed overnight; institutional knowledge cannot. In the corporate language of offshoring, “knowledge transfer” and “knowledge sharing” are euphemisms for when American employees are ordered to write manuals, record step-by-step walkthroughs, and conduct Zoom training sessions to train the offshore workers who will take their jobs.

The same “Specialist - Cash App & Receivables” job hints at precisely that “knowledge transfer” or “knowledge sharing” process:

• “Support training documentation and knowledge sharing for both onshore and offshore teams.”

The same language appears across many other postings for accounting jobs — for example, a “Specialist in Producer & Broker Commission Payables” role mentions “offshore delivery teams” 4 times, including “knowledge sharing”:

Another accounting post, “Director - Premium Payables”, lists “offshore” 6 times:

• “managing both onshore and offshore teams”

• “managing global teams in offshore delivery centers”

• “provide functional leadership to offshore teams within the Accounting & Finance Operations team.”

• “Champion change management to ensure smooth adoption of new processes and systems across onshore and offshore teams

• “Experience leading large, high performing teams (ideally a mix of onshore and offshore/captive/outsourced teams)”

• “overseeing day-to-day operations managed by teams onshore and offshore for NA Retail and Specialty business (supports approximately 60% of Acrisure revenue)”

A Senior Director, Digital & Systems Operations posting says the ideal candidate should understand “offshore/nearshore delivery strategies.” It also included a dedicated section called “Vendor & Offshore Relationship Management,” with responsibilities to “manage offshore support teams” and to “develop and execute strategies that leverage outsourcing, offshoring, and hybrid delivery models to improve cost and service performance.”

Across these jobs, Acrisure repeatedly describes Americans as the “onshore escalation point” who provide “functional leadership” and “knowledge sharing” to “offshore workers” at the “Accounting Global Delivery Center” where the actual day-to-day accounting functions take place.

In the course of my investigation, I identified at least 9 offshore contractors with publicly available evidence of having worked with Acrisure.

• Taskforce BPO (Macedonia)

• Patra Corporation (India & Philippines)

• EFFIKA Group (Uzbekistan)

• ReSource Pro (China, India, Philippines)

• LeadMaker (Philippines)

• InsBOSS (Philippines)

• Lean Solutions (Colombia)

• Tata Consultancy Services (India)

• Cognizant Technology Solutions (India)

Drilling down further, I identified the two specific contractors to which Acrisure outsourced accounting work.

The first is Lean Solutions, in Colombia, which, in the months following the 400 layoffs in Grand Rapids, boasted about “growing our Acrisure Accounting team to 101 people”.

The Colombia evidence actually appears broader than the 101-person accounting team. Lean Solutions personnel publicly describe separate Acrisure West, Southwest, and Accounting teams, and a Lean manager advertised for insurance and data-entry staff specifically “to support the Acrisure account.”

Acrisure is also outsourcing some accounting functions to Poland. However, the Poland-based employees replacing American financial-accounting staff appear to be employed directly by Acrisure rather than through a third-party contractor.

They were all hired in the months following the American layoffs.

The main firm taking American accounting jobs is Tata Consultancy Services.

Tata’s entire business model is to take over a client’s finance department and move it to India or the Philippines to drive "cost reduction in core processes."

Tata established a dedicated “Acrisure finance unit” in the months after Acrisure’s U.S. accounting department was scheduled to be phased out in Q1 2026.

My sources tell me that Tata’s “Acrisure finance unit” has about 400 people.

Hilariously, all Tata contractors in Nagpur, Maharashtra, have pronouns in bio.

The second location involved is Pune, India.

Beginning in January 2026—just as Acrisure’s eliminated American accounting positions were scheduled to disappear—Tata Consultancy Services launched a sustained hiring campaign for insurance-accounting workers in Nagpur, India.

At a January 3 “Mega Walk-In”, TCS recruited “Accounts Payable—Premium Payable” workers to reconcile direct-bill commissions from insurance carriers, modify broker commission rates, track carrier payments and investigate discrepancies. A January 10 recruitment drive simultaneously sought workers for Record-to-Report, Premium Payables and Accounts Receivable–Billing. TCS repeated the hiring on January 24, recruiting separately for premium payables and insurance billing, then advertised the same billing role again on February 14, emphasizing a preference for “immediate joiners.” On April 10, TCS held another Nagpur drive for experienced accounts-payable and accounts-receivable workers.

Applicants were expected to know Applied Epic—the exact same insurance-management software used by Acrisure—and work American hours.

This is apparently the building in Nagpur where accounting work once performed in Michigan by Americans is now being transferred:

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Tata’s $168 Million Insurance-Platform Case

TCS has used a similar insurance offshoring strategy before—and just last week, the Supreme Court declined to review a $168 million judgment arising from it.

In that case, TCS took over Transamerica’s life-insurance operations and absorbed more than 2,000 of its employees. Federal courts found that some of those workers transferred proprietary source code and technical materials to TCS’s offshore personnel, helping the company accelerate development and migration work for its competing offshore platform.

The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear TCS’s appeal left in place approximately $56 million in compensatory damages and $112 million in punitive damages.

The case does not establish misconduct at Acrisure. But it clearly maps out the immense regulatory, security, and operational risks that materialize when an American insurer’s internal database knowledge, systems, and client data are fast-tracked into TCS’s offshore delivery network.

The Second Round of Layoffs

In May 2026, Acrisure announced a much larger round of 2,250 layoffs—equal to 11 percent of its workforce—to be implemented across its U.S. operations. This is the largest single-employer 2026 layoff in the insurance brokerage subsector. From what I understand, 1000 of the layoffs are through 2026 and 1,200 or so through 2027.

My anonymous sources say Acrisure internally refers to this round of layoffs as “Project Bradshaw,” while the earlier accounting layoffs were code-named “Project Greene.” The names follow a football theme tied to Acrisure’s $150 million naming-rights deal for Acrisure Stadium, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers: Terry Bradshaw and “Mean” Joe Greene are two of the most famous players in franchise history.

Again, disgruntled employees took to the /r/GrandRapids subreddit, complaining about having to train their overseas replacements:

I tried to speak with Acrisure employees on the record for this article, but nobody was willing. They are all terrified. One anonymous employee told me:

Fortunately, there was no need to persuade employees to speak on the record. After the second round of layoffs, dozens of frustrated Acrisure workers took to Facebook with their real names and described publicly what they said was happening inside the company:

The primary beneficiary of “Project Bradshaw” layoffs, my sources say, is Cognizant.

Acrisure and Cognizant do not appear to have publicly announced their relationship, and I have not located a contract explicitly identifying Acrisure as Cognizant’s client. But Cognizant’s recent hiring activity provides remarkable corroboration: the timing, software, job functions, and locations all closely match the work Acrisure is now eliminating across its American operations.

The Amphitheater Whitewashing

Acrisure announced its latest layoffs just five days after the opening night of the Acrisure Amphitheater, downtown Grand Rapids’ newest entertainment venue.

Acrisure paid $30 million for the naming rights.

There is no evidence that Acrisure deliberately timed the layoff announcement to coincide with the amphitheater’s opening. Still, the timing was remarkably convenient. The opening generated precisely the publicity the company would have wanted to overshadow the layoffs: ribbon cuttings, Lionel Richie, civic celebration, and repeated praise for Acrisure’s commitment to Grand Rapids.

The juxtaposition is a PR disaster.

Acrisure Amphitheater was built with a $30 million State of Michigan grants and city-issued bonds whose debt service is funded through Kent County hotel-tax revenue.

Likewise, when Acrisure moved its headquarters to Grand Rapids, it received $7 million in economic incentives. As part of the incentive package for that public subsidy, Acrisure committed to create and maintain 400 new, high-paying jobs in Michigan.

That grant expired at the end of 2025… exactly when Acrisure fired 400 people.

Also in December 2025, the CEO of Acrisure announced a record $401 million commitment to Michigan State University, $100 million of it to literally buy 10% of their football team’s revenue-generating operations. The new MSU president and athletic director who orchestrated this deal then just abruptly left.

The point is not that Acrisure was obligated to give that money to employees, or that Acrisure cannot purchase naming rights while cutting costs.

The point is that Acrisure plainly had hundreds of millions of dollars available for prestige projects, stadium branding and college athletics. Against that backdrop, it is deeply unseemly for the company to accept public subsidies intended to create Michigan jobs, then eliminate those jobs and transfer them to India.

Conclusion: The IPO Story

On April 1, 2026—seven weeks before the 2,250 additional layoffs—S&P Global Ratings changed Acrisure’s outlook from stable to negative.

The numbers explain why. Acrisure’s adjusted leverage had risen to 9.6 times EBITDA by the end of 2025, up from roughly eight times the previous year. Its adjusted EBITDA margin had fallen from 27 percent to 21 percent, placing it among the lowest-margin insurance brokers rated by S&P. In North America, its organic growth had slowed to just 1 to 2 percent.

“[Acrisure] have to respond more aggressively and more quickly because they’ve got to manage their debt loans,” says Kevin Stipe, CEO of insurance brokerage consulting firm Reagan. “Because PE firms generally use debt, then it is fair to say that they have to respond to some of these things more quickly and sometimes more strongly. But I think the key part of the story is that growth is slowing for brokers.”

Acrisure has grown extraordinarily quickly, but not primarily by inventing revolutionary insurance technology. It grew by acquiring a vast number of independent, small-to-midsize insurance agencies and consolidating them under a common corporate umbrella.

Through that acquisition spree, Acrisure’s revenue grew from $38 million in roughly 2013–2014 to about $4 billion by 2023—an increase of approximately 105-fold in ten years.

That roll-up model works beautifully while acquisitions keep producing headline growth. But eventually the company must prove that the collection of agencies it assembled can generate stronger organic growth and wider margins on its own.

By 2026, Acrisure was under pressure to do exactly that.

The company had spent years positioning itself for an eventual public offering. It hired John Tuttle, the former global head of listings at the New York Stock Exchange, as its president. It raised $725 million in preferred equity at a $23 billion valuation in 2022, followed by $2.1 billion in convertible senior preferred stock at a $32 billion valuation in 2025.

Those securities are not ordinary shares that can be sold on a public exchange. Private-equity investors, executives and potentially some owners of businesses acquired by Acrisure hold private company equity whose value cannot readily be converted into cash without an IPO, a company sale or a secondary transaction.

There is public evidence that Acrisure has at least sometimes used its own stock as acquisition currency. That matters because many insurance-agency owners spent decades building their businesses before selling them to Acrisure. To the extent that sellers accepted Acrisure shares, rollover equity, earnouts or other equity-linked consideration, part of the price they received for their life’s work remains illiquid—effectively “locked” inside a private company.

A great deal of supposed wealth therefore exists as Acrisure paper. Until a liquidity event occurs, that paper cannot easily be converted into cash.

An IPO would force investors to decide what Acrisure actually is: a conventional insurance brokerage assembled through thousands of acquisitions, or an automated fintech platform capable of generating software-like margins.

That distinction could be worth billions of dollars.

The incentives are therefore straightforward:

• Acrisure expanded too fast.

• Margins had deteriorated.

• Leverage was extremely high.

• Acrisure was positioning itself for an IPO.

• Offshore labor could reduce operating costs (“window dressing”).

• The “AI” narrative could persuade Wall Street to award Acrisure a technology premium rather than value it as a vanilla private-equity roll-up, thereby artificially inflating their upcoming IPO by billions of dollars.

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But never a population problem.

Anyone who suggested that record immigration levels might be overwhelming Canada’s housing and healthcare systems was treated as if he had committed a moral offense. You were not making a basic supply-and-demand argument. You were “blaming immigrants,” “scapegoating newcomers,” or spreading racist conspiracy theories.

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Liberal ministers said this explicitly.

In 2022, 2023, and 2024, Immigration Minister Marc Miller repeatedly rejected any blame on immigrants/international students for the housing crisis, arguing they were “no more responsible for the housing crunch than they are for rising interest rates,” and warned that public debate would cause “stigmatization of particularly people of diversity that come to this country to make it better, and that includes international students.”

For years, Miller repeated these talking points on a weekly basis.

In 2025, Miller performed an utterly shameless 180. After years of treating immigration-housing skepticism as bigotry or paranoia, he now openly boasts that immigration does, in fact, affect housing.

Miller’s reversal captures the Liberal Party’s broader heel turn: an attempt to distance itself from the stench of Justin Trudeau.

Prime Minister Mark Carney was sworn in in March 2025, and almost overnight, the taboo vanished. Suddenly, it was no longer racist to say in polite company that Canada had imported people faster than it could house them.

Carney immediately began reversing the population shock the Liberals had spent years pretending did not exist:

1. Cut permanent-resident admissions from the Trudeau-era plan of 500,000 per year to 395,000 in 2025, 380,000 in 2026, and 365,000 in 2027.

2. Capped temporary residents.

3. Restricted international-student growth through the study-permit cap, tighter rules on designated learning institutions, and stricter post-graduation work-permit eligibility.

4. Restricted the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, including the reinstatement of pre-pandemic restrictions, lower hiring caps, shorter permit durations, and limits on the use of low-wage foreign labour in regions with higher unemployment.

5. Restricted family open-work permits and chain migration.

6. Ended the visitor-to-worker conversion loophole, the temporary policy that allowed visitors already inside Canada to apply for work permits without leaving the country.

7. Tightened asylum eligibility by expanding grounds for refugee-claim ineligibility and restrictions on people who had already been in Canada for more than a year before filing a claim.

8. Targeted immigration fraud and abuse by consultants via new/harsher penalties for paid immigration representatives who break the law.

9. Tripled deportation numbers from the Covid era, and doubled deportation numbers from the pre-Covid baseline.

While the stock of “temporary” foreign workers remains high, the flow has effectively been throttled. In 2025, Carney’s first year in office, Canada saw negative population growth for the first time since Confederation in 1867!

This week, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) announced:

• 88% drop in new international students

• 78% drop in new international workers

• 80% drop in new asylum claims

The raw numbers are stunning:

To be clear, massive structural loopholes remain. Take Bill C-3, passed into law last year: it amends Canada’s Citizenship Act to extend citizenship by descent beyond the first generation, allowing foreign-born citizens to pass it to unlimited generations abroad with minimal residency requirements.

There is still an incredibly long way to go. But while Carney hasn’t completely shut off the tap—a political impossibility given the institutional momentum—he is at least forcing the ship in the right direction. It doesn’t excuse the years of elite gaslighting that got us here, but it is a stark departure from the Trudeau status quo.

Carney essentially stole Pierre Poilievre’s homework, but kept it quiet, technocratic, and respectable. No cringe slogans. No culture-war theatrics. No obvious permission structure for leftists to accuse him of xenophobia. That reflects a deeper understanding of the Canadian psyche. Many Canadians know the country imported people faster than it could house them, but they are too polite and still recoil from anything that feels cruel, crude, or openly anti-immigrant. Carney gave them a way to support restriction without feeling as though they had crossed a moral line. He did things politely and quietly.

The vibe is shifting.

Even Tim Hortons, Canada’s most prominent importer of mass slave labor, this week announced that they would reduce their reliance on temporary foreign workers and hire 10,000 Canadians…

… although that may be an empty promise, writes :

Without Diminishment

Alexander Brown: No, Tim Hortons isn’t suddenly interested in hiring Canadians

If you believe yesterday’s announcement that Tim Hortons plans to dial back its use (and clear abuse) of the Temporary Foreign Worker Programme (TFWP) to hire “10,000 people locally” out of the goodness of its heart, I have a below-sea-level basement apartment to sell you in Richmond, B.C.’s peat-based Delta soil…

Read more

3 months ago · 43 likes · 2 comments · Without Diminishment Editor and Alexander Brown

Housing Prices

With the most important immigration inflows choked off by up to 88%, the desperate bidding wars that characterized the Canadian rental market have completely disintegrated

Average asking rents across Canada have fallen year-over-year (YoY) for 19 consecutive months as of April 2026, and in April 2026, the national average asking rent for a house dropped by 7.9% YoY:

In many cities, rent is down by double digits YoY:

Hamilton & Toronto are down ~27% from their peak:

My personal favorite is Brampton, Ontario, which has the highest South Asian population in the country, and is in absolute freefall:

The numbers don't lie, even if the politicians do. For a decade, they weaponized the language of tolerance to protect a broken economic model that enriched slumlords, corporate fast-food franchises, and strip-mall colleges at the expense of an entire generation of young Canadians.

These liars and traitors will never apologize. They will never admit that the “racists” and “conspiracy theorists” were simply describing supply and demand.

But the taboo is broken, the numbers are moving, and the old consensus is dead.

The clearest sign that the taboo has shattered is that Liberals are now beginning to outflank Conservatives from the right. Eric Lombardi, a candidate for the Ontario Liberal leadership, is openly running on what amounts to a mass-remigration platform, calling for Canada to unwind its temporary-resident population from roughly five million people nationally to well under one million over the next five to ten years.

That would have been politically unthinkable two years ago. Not from a fringe populist party. Not from a Conservative backbencher. From a Liberal. Yet here we are: the party that spent the Trudeau years treating immigration restraint as a moral crime is now producing candidates who are willing to say, in plain language, that millions of temporary residents must leave.

This is how completely the politics have shifted. The Conservatives spent years trying to make the immigration-housing argument acceptable. Carney quietly absorbed it into government policy. Now Liberals are beginning to run ahead of the Conservative Party itself, using the language of administrative realism rather than nationalist revolt. What was racist in 2023 is Liberal pragmatism in 2026.

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It was the chance of a lifetime.

Rufo had just spent the past five years positioning himself as the face of the anti-woke movement — a champion for meritocracy, a voice for disillusioned young men frustrated by affirmative action and collapsing institutional standards — now, he had the chance to handpick anyone — literally from a pool of thousands of hyper-competent young geniuses — and for months, he bragged non-stop about using this opportunity to assemble a team of ‘‘dangerous’’ “killers” and “assassins” who would “build institutions” and “advance the conservative movement” with dogged precision and intelligence.

So… who did he hire?

Rufo’s first hire, Hannah Grossman, is a self-described ‘‘Holocaust educator.’’

Hannah’s journalism career began in 2017 as a fellow as Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a Jewish supremacist think-tank, where she ground her teeth by lobbing softballs to Jeffrey Epstein associate Alan Dershowitz, in articles such ‘‘Alan Dershowitz on Trump, Israel, and Antisemitism.’’

She then worked as an associate editor at the Daily Caller, where she wrote such classics as ‘‘95-Year-Old World War II Paratrooper Captured By Nazis Describes His Harrowing Experience’’ and ‘‘150 Rockets Rain Down On Israel As Revenge For Palestinian Leader’s Death.’’ She then wrote for Jewish Press, Jewish Star, The Five Towns Jewish Times, Daily Wire, and Legal Insurrection, where she mostly spent her time complaining about anti-Zionism, e.g.: ‘'Important win for Jewish students against anti-Zionist discrimination at Cal State.’’

She was then given a shot in the A-leagues at Fox News, where her corpus of work doubled down on nakedly shilling for the Israel Lobby.

Here is a sample of her Fox News articles:

• Oscar celebrities accused of wearing 'symbol of bloodlust' originating from Palestinians 'lynching' 2 Israelis'

• Hamas defector tells pro-Palestinian activists they belong in 'a mental asylum' in brutal debate

• Black student erupts on anti-Israel 'White libs' for blocking path on campus

• Major 'political shift' among Jewish Cornell students as they question ties to progressive groups

• New York Times' fraught history covering Jews, Israel draws fresh backlash amid report on Hasidic schools

• Father of American held captive by Hamas says hostages 'are dying,' going through 'hell' in Gaza

• Ilhan Omar's daughter suspended from college amid anti-Israel activism

• 'Radical' pro-Palestinian groups increasingly target houses of worship for protests in alarming trend

• ‘Woke Kindergarten’ leader wants US, Israel destroyed

• House reps announce investigation into Harvard, MIT, UPenn after ‘morally bankrupt’ testimony on antisemitism

On Rufo’s team, she focused on “the fight against campus anti-semitism”:

Hard hitting stuff.

Look: I have nothing against Hannah Grossman personally, I have never met her. My focus isn’t on her as an individual but on her career, which is as an overt Israeli attack dog singularly dedicated to promoting Zionism with little nuance. She is an Israeli PR agent, not a journalist. Her Twitter feed is dedicated to retweeting Israeli government accounts and “Mossad Commentary”.

The real issue is what her hiring says about Rufo’s priorities. He swore to avenge the injustice done to disillusioned young conservative men, was given a slush fund to do it, and then promptly gave that slush fund to… a midwit Holocaust educator chick, to write about anti-semitism? Huh?

Since hiring Hannah, Rufo’s focus has conspicuously shifted. Instead of targeting woke absurdities or academic malfeasance, he has spent the past couple of years focused on attacking professors who call for financial divestment from Israel, or attacking other pundits for not being sufficiently Zionist.

The Free Press

Christopher Rufo: The Antisemitic Influencer Problem

In 1991, a motorcade carrying a Jewish rabbi cruised through Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. After getting separated from the group, one of the cars ran a red light and collided with another vehicle, which swerved onto the curb and hit two black children, leaving one injured and another dead. Within hours, the neighborhood had…

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a year ago · 313 likes · 297 comments · Christopher F. Rufo

His second hire, Christina Buttons, is much more scandalous.

buttonslives

Critical reporting on the evidence base behind biological explanations for transgender identity, gender-transition treatments, and psychiatric models—seeking a better path forward for mental health.

By Christina Buttons

For starters, the least of the problems is that it was a nepotism hire.

Christina Buttons is dating , another senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute… meaning after hiring a holocaust scholar, Chris Rufo promptly hired his buddy’s idiot girlfriend. Put bluntly: everyone knows she wouldn’t have gotten the job at the snobbiest intellectual thinktank in New York if she didn’t sleep her way there. So much for meritocracy.

Secondly, ‘‘Christina Buttons’’ is not her real name.

Her real name is “Christina Berry.”

She uses a nom-de-plume “Buttons” to obfuscate her past as a hardcore porn star.

She stared in at least 25 pornos from 2008-2016 under the stage name ‘‘Rita Lovely,’’ sometimes “Cute Courtney” , including such classics as ‘‘Perky Redhead Hippie Slut,’’ ‘‘Cum Stained Casting Couch 14,’’ ‘‘Only Teen Blowjobs 3,’’ and ‘‘Treat Me Like a Slut 3.’’

Here is her partial filmography:

Her career transition from ‘‘Perky Redhead Hippie Slut’’ to conservative gatekeeper was uncovered after an internet sleuth named Basil ran her face through facial recognition software, which showed R-rated stills from her pornos next to her professional headshots.

Basil gave this info to a drama streamer named Ethan Ralph, he tweeted it out, it went viral, and it’s been a recurring meme for 2 years now.

It was then double-confirmed when users on X cross-verified her moles/freckles with Rita Lovely’s moles/freckles:

Rufo pled ignorance, and besides, it didn’t matter, because she was repentant:

Except: she has always been unrepentantly pro-porn & pro-prostitution. In fact, she explicitly maintain that prostitutes and porn stars are making a completely rational choice because they can easily make more than someone earning minimum wage, so, sex work is good. Sex workers are NOT victims with no agency. It’s a rational choice.

Despite being pro-sex work, she has a habit of bullying other strippers, trafficked women, and CSA survivors, telling them without any irony to “take some responsibility” for “whoring yourself out all over the internet”:

Perhaps Rufo should have read her tweets before hiring her, where she explicitly warned him:

Or perhaps he could have looked at her previous employers, the Daily Wire, where she quit in a blaze of glory because Ben Shapiro was mean to trans people.

Another of her former employers was the “Jewish Institute for Liberal Values”:

buttonslives

A Quick Explainer On Woke Antisemitism

This explainer is adapted from an infographic slideshow created for Instagram and offers an intentionally oversimplified perspective to give a quick overview of the topics. It's not designed to be comprehensive, but the links interspersed within the article will be helpful for those seekin…

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3 years ago · 69 likes · 31 comments · Christina Buttons

Her Jewish liberal values include aggressive support for abortion:

She loves abortion so much that her Etsy page, where she posts doodles of softcore loli porn and sells pro-abortion tank tops, donates 20% of all proceeds to The Lillith Fund to pay for abortions:

I particularly like her art of naked Jewish children:

While she loves Judaism, she hates Christianity…

…so much so that she even hates her own name because it has “Christ” in it:

…this hatred for Christianity is despite the fact that as late as 2025, she has “never opened a Bible before”:

Of course, she would never criticize the Talmud — support for Israel is a prerequisite for working at the Manhattan Institute, whose board of Trustees includes names like Barr, Golub, Hertog, Singer, Kristol, Lefkowitz (Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer), Rosenkranz, Kaufman, Lebovitz, and Greenberg.

They fired their biggest star last year for milqueoast hemming and hawing about “well maybe we shouldn’t carpetbomb women and children in refugee camps”:

Glenn Loury

I Was Fired by the Manhattan Institute. Here's Why.

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a year ago · 111 likes · 60 comments · Glenn Loury

They publish articles claiming that anyone holding up a banner saying “NO US MILITARY AID TO ISRAEL” is a “civil terrorist”…

…and other articles arguing that free speech is “too sacred” and that more people should be “deported” for “anti-Israel speech”:

Here is the Manhattan Institute’s Director of Constitutional Studies, Ilya Shapiro, spreading the lie that Hamas burns babies alive in ovens, calling Palestinians “subhumans” who “must be eradicated”, and repeatedly calling for explicit “ethnic cleansing”:

But I digress.

Upon going viral for being a porn star who works at the most elite conservative thinktank in the world, she wrote an essay justifying it:

buttonslives

Crazy is You or Me, Amplified

In interviews, I’ve often shared how I became a journalist after discovering the stories of detransitioners—stories that deeply resonated with my own struggles with mental health and identity. I’ve been very open about the severe mental health crises I faced in my youth and have frequently…

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2 years ago · 654 likes · 106 comments · Christina Buttons

Her reasoning for doing porn is as follows:

I received many diagnoses throughout my life, the most recent being Asperger's syndrom… I eventually agreed to meet with a representative from an agency that had been hounding me, which led to my decision to make adult films to pay off my debt. At the time, and for several months thereafter, I believed I had bipolar disorder. However, I later realized that the instability I felt stemmed from other factors, including heavy drinking

So: BPD, heavy drinking, OCD, autism, and credit card debt.

A tale as old as time.

Then, after years of having “autistic” in her bio and loudly making having autism her entire personality, just last week, she came out and loudly proclaimed that autism is fake, her diagnosis was fake, and launched a whole anti-autism crusade:

As a wise woman once said: You spent over a decade whoring yourself out all over the internet, you have no one to blame but yourself. Take some responsibility for your actions, this perpetual victim act is pathetic.

Now she wants to be a gatekeeper of the conservative movement.

Sorry, but no.

Someone has to be the gatekeeper of the conservative movement.

Today it’s me.

Leave.

You don’t belong.

You are a cancer.

Go back to being who you really are: a mentally ill adventuress bimbo with rainbow hair obsessed with abortion, who’s now only masquerading as a conservative gatekeeper to trick people into advancing the interests of Israel.

She is very explicit in this goal:

How Many Porn Stars Are There in Con Inc.?

Ms. Buttons isn’t the first porn star to infiltrate the conservative movement and rise to become a gatekeeper.

Not by a long shot.

One prominent example is “Jack Murphy”, who spent years pretending to be an Irish alphamale, later revealed as a gay Jewish pornographer whose actual name is John Goldman:

Another good example is conservative freedom warrior Corey DeAngelis, who did his porn under the name “Seth Rose”:

Chris Rufo, of course, defended his friend’s past as a gay porn star and maintained that he should keep his role as a Con Inc. gatekeeper:

Corey DeAngelis / “Seth Rose” headlined CPAC this year.

My favorite example in this genre is Brian Riedl, who joined the Manhattan Institute as a senior fellow in economic policy in 2017.

After working for the Manhattan institute for a decade as their resident tax wonk, in 2025, Brian Reidl, chose to shatter his own family and traumatize his children so that he could put on a skirt, paint his face, and do news hits as a Manhattan Institute expert flaunting his fetish and subverting/destroying the conservative movement:

The Manhattan Institute using female pronouns for “Jessica” Riedl, is, of course, extra funny because Rufo built his entire career on the absurdity of pronouns.

The Real Reason Christina Buttons Was Hired

It turns out that Christina Button’s biggest fan on Twitter is a woman named Suzy Lebovitz-Edelman, who has sycophantically replied to her hundreds of times before Buttons ever worked at the Manhattan Institute:

Suzy Lebovitz-Edelman, Christina’s top reply-guy, is married to hedge-fund manager Joseph Edelman, whose net worth is roughly $2.5–$3 billion. Their interests can be traced by their donations history. This includes the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish World Service, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, The Tikvah Fund, Bari Weiss’s UATX, and Media Matters.

Suzy and Joseph are among Manhattan Institute’s top donors, giving them a $725,000 cash infusion in 2022-2024 for a “gender identity initiative.”

The term “Woke Right” and “Woke Reich” came from Suzy Edelman-Lebovitz and James Lindsay.

Here, Chris Rufo corrects Rod Dreher over his misuse of the term, since he is paid by the Edelman's through their special donation devoted to "transgender issues":

As part of this “Woke Right” psychological operation, Suzy met with Chris Rufo and James Lindsay to coordinate messaging:

Recently, James Lindsay attacked Arby’s as "Woke Right”:

When Chris Rufo stepped out of line and made fun of James Lindsay for this, Suzy put him back into his place. She keeps him on a short leash.

Suzy Edelman-Lebovitz is Christina Button’s biggest fan.

Suzy Edelman-Lebovitz is Chris Rufo’s handler.

She tells him what he is or isn’t allowed to tweet about, and who to hire.

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• https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.411922/gov.uscourts.txnd.411922.1.0.pdf

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Wang’s undergrad degree is from Duke, and he earned Masters degrees from NYU and South Florida, and a PhD from Cornell.

His lawsuit is 18 pages long.

It begins on page 1 by asserting that SMU has a systemic problem with race discrimination and retaliation that violates the Civil Rights Act, and then spends the next 17 pages building that argument.

I reached out to SMU for comment, but did not receive a response.

Clearing the Bar for Tenure

At its core, this case is simple: Sean Wang was denied tenure in 2024.

In April 2025, Wang filed a complaint to the President appealing the tenure decision and claiming discrimination, and in May 2025, the President denied the appeal.

SMU’s own standards are not ambiguous. The Cox School’s Promotion and Tenure Manual sets a clear benchmark: “at least four top-tier publications.”

Wang obliterated that standard… this was not a borderline case.

SMU is a respectable but not elite institution, ranked #88 nationally, and its tenure bar is clearly defined. By those standards, Wang’s record is exceptional. Far from a marginal candidate, his output more closely resembles that of a full professor at a significantly higher-ranked school.

By the time of his tenure review, he had published ten articles in top-tier journals (e.g. Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, and Management Science)—more than double the output of any other faculty member in the department at the time of their tenure decision.

His publications garnered nearly 2,000 citations, exceeding the citation count of all three Indian professors granted tenure in the Accounting department.

• https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fUc4WKwAAAAJ&hl=en

Nevertheless, SMU denied him tenure due to “bad fit” and repeatedly said that he needed “more citations” and “more visibility.” Between the 2023 and 2024 annual reviews, Dr. Wang was called a "bad fit" at least thirteen times by his Chair and Dean. SMU’s Associate Provost, Dr. Paige Ware, acknowledges in the lawsuit that “one of the cautionary alarm bells for anyone who’s looking at DEI is the word fit… that elusive word ‘fit’ that spits in the face of data.”

The “bad fit” contrast becomes sharper when Wang’s case is compared to his colleague, Sorabh Tomar (Indian). At the time of his third-year review, Tomar had ZERO publications, yet received a positive mid-career evaluation from the department chair (Indian). No concerns about “fit” were raised—even though his work, like Wang’s, involved behavioral research using experimental methods and collaboration with the same co-authors.

On its Faculty Permission to Hire Form, SMU recorded Dr. Wang as “White” in its HR and EEO records, erasing his self-identified minority status and treating him as a white man so that they may more easily discriminate against him.

Testimony From 4 SMU Professors

Testimony from the lawsuit:

1. Prof. Robin Pinkley (Janet & Craig Duchossois Endowed Professor of Management & Organizations, SMU)—a 35-year veteran of Cox who has served on numerous P&T committees—wrote to Dean Myers that the Department’s reliance on “fit” is “self-serving” and “does not stand up when compared to the empirical evidence provided by top-tier publications, citation counts, and invitations to speak at Harvard, London Business School, Kellogg, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon.” Prof. Pinkley concluded that “Sean Wang’s case was not treated in an unbiased manner consistent with the P&T document and our commitment to equity,” and warned that the current leadership’s pattern of bias “should not be tolerated.”

2. Prof. Pab Jotikashtira (Full Professor of Finance, SMU; member, Provost’s Advisory Committee on Tenure & Promotion) compared Dr. Wang’s record with the two Indian professors most recently tenured in Accounting. Prof. Jotikashtira found that Dr. Wang is “very significantly more productive than Gauri Bhat” and has “a comparable record to Neil Bhattacharya, who is ten years his senior,” adding that “any reasonable person would deem Sean’s citation count as more than sufficient for tenure.” Prof. Jotikashtira dismissed the Department’s quality and “fit” objections as “personal taste” and “absurd,” noting that the career success of ten top-tier publications “cannot be due to luck” given the less than ten percent acceptance rates in those journals.

3. Prof. Jeff Hales (Charles T. Zlatkovich Centennial Professor of Accounting, University of Texas at Austin) described Dr. Wang as “an outstanding researcher with few comparable peers.” Benchmarking against recent promotions at top-twenty business schools, Prof. Hales wrote that Dr. Wang’s 11 peer-reviewed articles (10 Financial Times Top 50 Journals) and nearly 2,000 citations would already match the average full-professor dossier, and that Dr. Wang has “more citations than I had at a similar point in my career.” He concluded that SMU hired Dr. Wang “to do exactly this kind of research—and he delivered.”

4. Prof. David Wood (Glenn D. Ardis Professor of Accounting, Brigham Young University) noted that SMU’s claim that Dr. Wang did not meet the research standards as “ludicrous” and that Dr. Wang met the research bar for full even for top 20 schools.

Discrimination by Desai

On November 19, 2024, Dr. Hemang Desai, Chair of the Accounting Department, informed Dr. Wang of a negative departmental vote (3–1). All three Indian faculty members voted against tenure, citing a failure to achieve “outstanding” performance, while the sole non-Indian faculty member voted in favor.

Wang’s complaint repeatedly alleges that, from the start of his employment, Desai held him to different and more demanding standards than his Indian colleagues.

Since at least 2006, when Hemang Desai (an Indian-Origin faculty member) became a full professor in SMU’s Cox School of Business, the Accounting Department granted tenure to 100 percent of Indian-origin candidates (two of two) who met the published “four top-tier publications” standard, while denying tenure to 100 percent of non-Indian candidates (zero of five) who met the same standard … This pattern is consistent with an ancestry-based preference for Indian-origin candidates and disfavor toward non-Indian candidates. … Dr. Wang’s research productivity significantly exceeds that of his tenured Indian colleagues in the department when they received tenure.”

The filing also includes a more unusual claim: in Spring 2024, when offices were reassigned in the department’s new building, Wang alleges they were “segregated” along ethnic lines— Indian faculty were handed prime offices with nice views, while East Asian faculty were assigned to a Chinese ghetto down the hall.

When I googled Desai’s name, this was the first review that popped up:

Notably, Desai’s son graduated from SMU in 2024 with a degree in business, and was recommended (I wonder by who?) by the school to receive Poets and Quants’ “Best and Brightest Business Major” award.

In that interview, his son described yet another award from SMU: “The achievement I’m most proud of is being selected as a Don Jackson Fellow for the Alternative Asset Management Center Program here at SMU.”

Gee, I wonder how his son got picked to Don Jackson Fellows for the Alternative Asset Management Center Program at SMU Cox... And how he got such a glowing recommendation from Jim Bryan, the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs at SMU Cox...

Jim Bryan: “The best students in every school are the ones who don’t just succeed in the classroom, but who strive to make the school better when they leave. Mohan Desai is one of the best examples of this concept I’ve ever seen... I can’t think of anyone better to mentor our new students than Mohan. No matter where he goes after graduation, I want Mohan wearing SMU Cox gear—there can be no greater advertisement for SMU Cox’s student body than Mohan Desai.”

While every father is proud of his son, the optics of the Department Chair's child sweeping competitive internal awards while the department's most productive professor is labeled a 'bad fit' are, at best, a conflict of interest.

My point isn’t to attack Desai’s son, it’s to highlight a pattern the lawsuit alleges: nepotism. A fish must swim; a beaver must build dams; a bird must fly; a fresh-off-the-boat Indian must hire and promote their own caste. Indians are famously one of the most nepotistic ethnic group in America, it’s just what they do, it is clearly how their culture operates, as documented in thousands of other lawsuits and articles, e.g.:

• Across India, Nepotism as a Way of Life (New York Times, 2012)

• Tech giant accused of hiring bias in favor of Indian workers (World of Labour, 2017)

• The US says Oracle is encouraging Indians to hire other Indians—and it’s killing diversity (Quartz, 2022)

• ‘Indian students preferred’: Discriminatory rental ads have people shying away from applying (CBC, 2020)

• Punjab Health Foundation’s hiring scandal exposes systemic nepotism epidemic (Samaa, 2023)

• Insiders Tel How IT Giant was intentionally discriminating against non-Indian workers (Bloomberg, 2024)

• The Public Timeline Of The Cisco Caste Discrimination Case (2024)

• ‘Nepotism never fails’: Indian-origin FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam draws flak over H-1B hiring (Times of India, 2025)

• Nepotism: The Silent Killer of Merit in India’s Legal Landscape (Hindu College Gazette, 2025)

• ‘This is why Indians are being hated’, US techies claim Indians taking high-paying jobs, ‘it’s nepotism’ (Financial Express, 2025)

• A White Man in the Indian-Dominated Tech Sector (American Renaissance, 2025)

• Indian nepotism in the software industry explained by an insider, parts I-III (Reddit, 2025)

SMU’s Response

The university’s response filing is sparse, offering little substantive detail or point-by-point rebuttal. SMU denies the allegations in full and asserts that Dr. Wang is not entitled to any relief.

• https://assets2.pacermonitor.com/filings/Wang_v_Southern_Methodist_University/Wang_v_Southern_Methodist_University__txndce-25-03129__0014.0.pdf

Trial is scheduled to begin on February 1, 2027.

Wang is seeking preliminary and permanent injunctive relief requiring SMU to:

1. Grant Dr. Wang tenure and promotion to Associate Professor;

2. Grant Dr. Wang an expedited, conflict-free review for promotion to Full Professor with appropriate retroactive compensation adjustments if the fact-finder determines Dr. Wang's qualifications warranted such promotion at the time tenure was denied;

3. Cease discriminatory practices in tenure and promotion decisions;

4. Implement and enforce written policies prohibiting the use of subjective “fit” criteria in tenure decisions.

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