Mike Bloomberg Lurks Behind Onion’s Takeover of InfoWars

Plus, “clean” energy; send nuclear-armed U.S. subs to China’s doorstep?

A relic of the Bloomberg 2020 presidential campaign that is on hand in the office of the editor.

A media industry story percolating over the past few weeks has been that the humor publishing company The Onion is buying Alex Jones’s far-right conspiracy site Infowars out of bankruptcy.

NPR has done two stories about it (November 14 and November 19) and so have the New York Times (November 14 and November 19) and the Wall Street Journal (November 15, November 19). None of the articles mentions the name “Michael Bloomberg.” Yet a November 14 press release from Everytown for Gun Safety announcing the deal said, “Everytown for Gun Safety will be the primary advocacy organization working with The Onion and has signed a multi-year advertising agreement for the new platform. During the relaunch period, Everytown will serve as the exclusive advertiser.”

The Bloomberg Philanthropies website lists Everytown for Gun safety under “founder’s projects.” Bloomberg is offering to match donations to the group. The Everytown board includes two people who worked for Bloomberg when Bloomberg was mayor of New York, and Everytown lists the same accountant (Geller) and law firm (Willkie Farr) as Bloomberg uses. The president of Everytown, John Feinblatt, was chief policy adviser and criminal justice coordinator in City Hall during Bloomberg’s years as mayor.

Anyway, if some right-wing billionaire like Charles Koch or Rebekah Mercer took control of a previously left-wing outlet such as MSNBC or the Huffington Post with a plan to have the National Rifle Association as the exclusive advertiser, you can bet that NPR and the New York Times would be up in arms about the threat to editorial independence. 

With the passage of time, Bloomberg’s term as mayor of New York looks more and more heroic in retrospect, at least by comparison to what followed. He’s certainly been a genius at building and sustaining a fantastically profitable business. His higher education philanthropy and his giving focused on charter schools have been creative and shrewd. Yet none of that justifies bending over backward to keep Bloomberg’s name out of a story in which, other than Alex Jones, he’s clearly the most newsworthy individual.

“Clean” energy: “Billionaire Chairman of Conglomerate and Seven Other Senior Business Executives Indicted in Connection With Scheme to Pay Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Bribes and Conceal Bribery Scheme From U.S. Investors” is the headline of a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York announcing an indictment of Guatam Adani of India and seven others.

Parallel complaints were also filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC, to its credit, avoids using the “billionaire” term in its press release. Last we checked, being a billionaire isn’t a federal crime or a violation of the securities law. Invoking the term in the press release just makes it appear that the Justice Department is seeking out wealthy individuals to charge with crimes, rather than impartially enforcing the law. 

The story as described by the prosecutors is that the Indian businessman won an Indian government contract for solar energy production, then raised capital in U.S. financial markets while falsely claiming compliance with anti-bribery laws.

There are doubtless plenty of crooked fossil-fuel executives, too, but the case is a reminder that the bigger the government role in purchasing energy, dictating its sources, and regulating its production, the greater the opportunities for corruption. 

Trump takes The Editors’ advice: The Editors, November 14, 2024: “NPR Is unlistenable…the idea that a cent of taxpayer dollars is going to pump out this nonsense really rankles. If Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are looking to cut wasteful government spending with their new “DOGE”—Department of Government Efficiency—whatever is going into public radio would be a fine place to begin:”

“Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government,” the Wall Street Journal, November 20: “DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.”

Republicans have been burned in the past when they attempt to cut public broadcasting funding and people rally around popular programs such as Sesame Street, the Republicans retreat, and a high political cost is paid for minimal or no budget savings. Yet the symbolism is important. If the Musk-Ramaswamy effort makes a genuine dent in federal spending, it’ll be a rare achievement in a Washington culture where spending tends to move only in one direction—up.

“The U.S. media’s war on Trump’s Middle East policy”: A former Israel ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, writes in the Times of Israel: “In recent articles on Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on northern Israel, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal all referred to the ‘Israeli-occupied’ or ‘Israeli-controlled’ Golan Heights. The terms were revealing. In March 2019, President Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, making it an indivisible part of the Jewish state. In describing the Heights as ‘occupied’ and ‘controlled’ by Israel, America’s papers of record were publicly rejecting the position of the country’s democratically elected leader in favor of those of Belgium, China, and the Obama administration. The willingness of the mainstream press to make its own foreign policy signals a deeply troubling trend.”

Nuclear-armed subs at China’s doorstep: Two fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, Kyle Balzer and Dan Blumenthal, have a piece in Foreign Affairs, “The True Aims of China’s Nuclear Buildup,” outlining Communist China’s recent steps and future ambitions, and offering suggestions for countering them. 

China “has more land-based intercontinental and intermediate-range missile launchers than the United States does,” they write. “What’s more, Washington retired its only regional nuclear option—a submarine-launched cruise missile—in 2013, meaning in a potential crisis it would have no regionally based nuclear capability to reassure its allies of its security guarantee.”

More: 

In 2012, Beijing seized from the Philippines control of the Scarborough Shoal, an important fishery in the South China Sea, using both low-intensity military force and economic pressure, including boycotts of some Philippine exports. The United States had protested China’s de facto annexation of the shoal, but Beijing’s escalation against the Philippines forced Washington to back off. Last summer, Beijing again initiated clashes in the South China Sea when Chinese maritime vessels rammed into Philippine ships within Manila’s exclusive economic zone. China faced no serious consequences.

Japan, too, has been subject to Chinese coercion since the dawn of the twenty-first century—and the pressure is rising with China’s nuclear buildup. Today, China is engaged in a persistent effort to unilaterally change the status quo of the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu Islands) just north of Taiwan; almost daily, the Chinese navy operates in their vicinity to enforce China’s “domestic maritime law.” Chinese military forces also routinely enter or surround Japanese territory. In August, for example, the Chinese navy and air force violated Japan’s territorial waters and airspace—an escalation that was eclipsed, just weeks later, when China sailed an aircraft carrier through Japanese waters for the first time. This persistent pressure is designed to wear Tokyo down, weaken the U.S.-Japanese alliance, and normalize China’s behavior to create a new bar by which to measure future aggression.

The authors suggest that the U.S. respond by “embedding Japan and South Korea in a regional missile defense system” and also by “redeployment of a submarine-launched nuclear-armed cruise missile.” They also suggest a political effort to “disseminate writing by Chinese dissidents about the government’s corruption and economic failings.”

I don’t have a well informed view on whether “a submarine-launched nuclear-armed cruise missile” is the right or wrong approach, but it does seem that without some policy shift, the U.S. risks seeing South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and other U.S. economic partners fall under Chinese Communist military intimidation. The concern is that Communist China today is something like Hamas-controlled Gaza before October 7, 2023—poised for an unexpected violent surprise breakout.

Comments of the day: We are blessed here at The Editors with some extremely wise subscribers who sometimes add value for the whole community by publishing comments. 

The November 19, 2024 piece on Adam Lovinger’s book drew a response from Richard Perle, who wrote, “As Elon Musk searches for low-hanging fruit to reduce federal spending, he would do well to begin by abolishing altogether the unit that was once called the Office of Net Assessment. In its glory days, the office was run by an extraordinary intellectual strategist, Andrew Marshall, a man who commanded the respect of all the Secretaries of Defense during his long tenure. It did important, innovative defense analyses, remembered by many senior officials (I was one) who knew Andy and his small group, and by Secretaries of Defense who paid close attention to his often out-of-the-box thinking. It should have been abolished when Andy retired, but that is not how Washington works. It continued to receive millions of taxpayer dollars as it descended into mediocrity, handing out contracts for studies no one read to politically favored contractors. It should be abolished and its budget notched in DOGE's belt.”

And the November 20, 2024 piece on Netanyahu’s “If we have to, we will fight with our fingernails” speech elicited a comment from Michael Segal, who wrote in part:

As Netanyahu was giving this speech on Monday, I was visiting with friends in Tel Aviv, talking about the situation but not watching the speech. As I watched the video of the speech on Wednesday, it seemed eerily targeted at rebutting many assertions that my hosts were making. But not all - there was no mention of needing to stay in Lebanon until the missiles were eliminated. Then, in an ending that seemed right out of Michael O'Donoghue's "How to Write Good" (https://workableweb.com/_pages/tips_how_to_write_good.htm), as we prepared to leave for the airport for the nonstop flight to the USA, the sirens went off and we spent 10 minutes in the protected room of the apartment listening to the booms from nearby Bnei Brak of a rocket from Lebanon and its interceptors….

The final words of Netanyahu's speech channel a fabulous song by Sarit Hadad from the 2014 Gaza war:

After an emotional speech addressing doubts about the leadership of the war, Netanyahu evoked the optimism and determination of this song that is so familiar to his audience.

Thank you: The Editors is a reader-supported publication. We have no exclusive ad deal with Everytown for Gun Safety, with the National Rifle Association, or with anyone else. The ranks of paying subscribers has been growing at an encouraging pace. We can use a few more to meet our year-end goals. If you sign up today for as little as $8 a month or $80 a year, you’ll assure your full continued access to all the content, and you’ll also help support our growth and sustain our editorial independence. You’ll find information and analysis you won’t find anywhere else.