• https://theoldgloryclub.com/

To get in, you have to email a clandestine email address and they screen you with written interview questions. Then you have provisional membership where you attend a bunch of meetings before they determine whether you’re cool.

But it’s also highly decentralized, and some chapters are really paranoid. I know that one OGC chapter in a major metro requires ID verification and you have to do an in-person interview in a suit.

Members generally range from their early twenties to their mid-forties. Many have large Twitter followings; many also belong to their local Young Republicans or Republican clubs. They use the OGC as a coordination group to collectivize the young member bloc to infiltrate and push both organizations Right. And because it’s a secret society, the boomer-run Republican clubs aren’t even aware this is happening. It’s pretty ingenious actually.

I am not a member, partly because I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member; partly because, as a humble immigrant, I respect the club’s emphasis on old-stock/heritage American identity and have no desire to subvert it; and partly because I am Catholic, with religious objections to joining secret societies.

Still, the secrecy only goes so far. I spoke freely with about a dozen members and former members for this article. I am withholding their names, but nobody seemed particularly reluctant to talk. Several are airing their grievances openly on Twitter. Whatever discretion the club usually maintains, its internal feud has now spilled out onto the public square.

Until this week’s split, OGC had 40 chapters nationwide, with quaint names like Indiana’s Tippecanoe Society, Virginia’s Vetus Dominium Club, New England’s New Ivy League, Alabama’s Magnolia League, and the Yellow Dog Pack in Florida.

Now it’s 38 chapters.

Two days ago, the Nathanael Greene Society, OGC’s North Carolina chapter, announced that it had been notified of its “disaffiliation from the Old Glory Club.”

Thirty-four minutes later, the Lewis and Clark Society, the Montana chapter, announced its own removal.

What happened?

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The Montana Disaffiliation

I contacted the Montana chapter, whose members provided me with a copy of the open letter they say prompted their expulsion.

One of its central grievances is blunt: “Outright hatred of America has no place in our club.” Members resented having their local, grassroots work overshadowed by statements from elsewhere in the organization:

“Everything we build in Gallatin County is exposed to whatever the loudest voices in the OGC said last if we remain in the OGC. Most often, we are embarrassed.”

When I asked for examples of this alleged anti-American behaviour, they sent me screenshots documenting another chapter president’s posts and activities, who:

• Wore a keffiyeh to the national convention

• Burned his MAGA hat

• Called America a “corpse” and said “America” no longer means what it once did

• Said he would not vote for JD Vance and advocated “voting down ballot blue” in the midterms

• Repeatedly referred to the Trump administration as “ZOG”

• Wrote: “I’d take an Islamic occupied government over a Zionist occupied government any day.”

• Purchased a Hezbollah-style patch featuring George Washington

  

• Called Republicans “the BROWN party” and “the party of BROWNS”

• Joked about an American pilot being shot down over Iran, converting to Sufism, and being pro-Iran

• Used a Twitter banner reading “Old Glory Club” in English lettering stylized to resemble Arabic calligraphy

Admittedly, not great optics for an organization that prides itself on trad aesthetics.

Still, one edgy guy does not establish the politics of an entire organization.

The Montana members sent examples of a couple of other members expressing anti-Israel and pro-Muslim sentiments. Their broader accusation was that OGC’s national leadership tolerated—and sometimes shared—a worldview that mixed hostility toward Israel (what the “Plan Trusters” would call “obsession with the JQ”) with apologetics for Hamas and Hezbollah and contempt for America.

Pro-Trump accounts are calling this worldview “Third Worldism”:

Reihan Salam, the Bangladeshi president of the Manhattan Institute, writing in Sapir Journal — which describes itself as a “journal exploring the future of the American Jewish community” — deigns to be the authority to define it:

“Third Worldism, a fusion of anti-Zionism, anti-Westernism, and anti-capitalism that places the sacralized victimhood of Palestinian Arabs at the center of a larger struggle against American imperialism. Unlike Islamism, Third Worldism is not primarily a religion-based ideology. Its most committed adherents, such as Mamdani himself, tend to lead largely secular lives. But, in important respects, it presents the more consequential long-term ideological challenge. Where jihadism targets American civilians as part of a larger struggle to overthrow “apostate” regimes in the Muslim world, Third Worldism endeavors to transform the nation’s ideological-intellectual milieu, shaping how Americans — well beyond the Muslim minority — understand their country and its place in the world.”

Some right-wingers who fell for this Manhattan Institute-spread meme sincerely believe they are describing sympathy for America’s enemies, often coupled with support for Muslim immigration. But the conflation also serves a political purpose for the more calculating, cunning, Zionists who intentionally spread it: it seeks to make hostility toward Israel synonymous with hatred of America, and to make love for Israel synonymous with patriotic love for America.

Another grievance in the Montana letter concerned what members called “the email incident.”

After a journalist published a hostile hitpiece about OGC, a member wrote an email to the enemy journalist saying, “Hey I am a liberal and a multi-time Democrat voter and I am in the OGC. You misunderstand us. Journalist to Journalist, you should take down your article.”

For some Montana members, this was a rude awakening. They understood their chapter as an organizing vehicle for the American right. Yet the broader organization apparently included a self-described liberal journalist who repeatedly voted Democratic. The ensuing internal debate compounded their frustration: figures in OGC’s national leadership opposed treating past support for Trump or Republican candidates as a reasonable membership standard.

Furthermore, some Catholic members wanted all Freemasons excluded, while some Protestant members wanted all Pagans excluded. Most Christians wanted atheists excluded. Some MAGA loyalists, meanwhile, wanted to exclude anyone who did not vote straight Republican. These were serious points of contention.

The Montana chapter president described to me the resulting identity problem:

“Frankly we had a number of embarrassing situations where people would come to us and ask us what the OGC was, and we couldn’t say definitively because the [Montana chapter] is a men’s Christian fraternity with right-wing politics but we couldn’t say that concretely of the OGC because we kept being embarrassed by public things like the email incident and the [pro-Muslim sentiment].”

He nevertheless rejected the idea that the dispute was fundamentally about Israel or loyalty to Trump:

“Something I would like to make clear is that many people in my club that was disaffiliated from the OGC do not like Donald Trump. We all have quite strong views on Israel (negative) and we are not at all neocon Zionist Republican types. We don’t have a neocon/zionist in the group.

…

We also don’t call ourselves plan trusters. The term used more often is Patriots. Realize that a decent portion of this is a patriotism thing: wanting to save the country and actually liking the country. There is a fair amount of JQ centered wignat third worldism now I suppose leading the OGC, which is funny, considering it’s THE OLD GLORY (stars and stripes) CLUB. I don’t even object to all of their positions or them doing that. The name just increasingly doesn’t fit the club.”

The Montana chapter could dislike Israel themselves while seeing the broader organization’s pro-Muslim and anti-ZOG rhetoric as obstacles to building Republican coalitions. Whatever distinctions they drew privately, being known locally as the “Third Worldist” club was unlikely to help them gain influence.

They were being pragmatic.

Montana’s members had a clear local strategy. They wanted to build the Young Republicans, win control of county and state Republican organizations, and place members in government. As they pursued those goals, they found themselves answering for statements and conduct elsewhere in OGC that they considered unhinged and damaging to their reputation.

“How can we justify a relationship with a national body that consistently attacks the politicians and Republican party we support?”

So they voted on whether to leave.

The vote was split.

The split vote produced a compromise: publish an open letter, then reconsider leaving at year’s end if their concerns remained unresolved. Members wanted clarity about OGC’s mission and membership standards; they were not demanding anyone’s expulsion. The letter posed three questions:

1. What is the Old Glory Club?

2. Who belongs in it, and where does it draw the line?

3. What does a chapter get from the national organization?

According to multiple sources, the national leadership viewed this letter as an ultimatum. Rather than yield to the ultimatum, they kicked them out.

The North Carolina Disaffiliation

Several OGC members I spoke with described the Nathanael Greene Society (NGS) as one of the club’s largest and most active chapters—and among its most enthusiastically pro-Trump. Its members wanted to organize within the Republican Party and turn their connections into political influence. In the view of some members I spoke with, they also wanted to steer OGC itself toward a more explicitly pro-Trump political mission.

That enthusiasm increasingly put them at odds with a national leadership that was largely disillusioned with Trump and angry about the Gaza and Iran wars. The central committee favored a fraternity whose members’ obligations to one another came before loyalty to any president or party.

According to my sources, the North Carolina chapter and national leadership had been clashing over this divide for roughly a year, with leadership increasingly characterizing the chapter’s conduct as “insubordinate.”

I reached out to the North Carolina chapter president and asked whether this narrative I cobbled together was accurate. He told me: “This is accurate. There’s more that could be said but I’m a biased source; and anyway, it may be best to let it lie.”

I then asked him, “what is the general sentiment in NGS toward Israel and Zionist Neocon types?”, and he provided me with the following statement:

The other faction would cynically reply that this is just soft-pedaling a position that doesn’t sell very well publicly at the moment.

Against that backdrop, William Wolfe’s appearance at the National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in Jerusalem became a flashpoint. A former Trump administration official at the State Department and Pentagon, Wolfe delivered a speech 2 weeks ago titled “America First Means America First.” I could not confirm whether he belonged to the Nathanael Greene Society, but sources linked his speech to the chapter’s removal. One called it the breaking point; another considered it a pretext for a separation that had been brewing for months.

The national leadership’s anger centered on Wolfe’s willingness to associate with NatCon’s chairman, Yoram Hazony—the grand Israeli pope of right-wing Zionism. For some OGC members, appearing at a Hazony-led event was itself a betrayal—a purity test Wolfe had failed simply by showing up, regardless of what he said.

Here is his 19-minute speech in its entirety:

I get the sense that his most vocal critics did not actually watch it. Wolfe’s argument was straightforward: you cannot be America First and Israel First. He was telling Israel’s supporters that American interests come first, including when the two countries’ priorities conflict.

That left him caught between two hostile audiences. Right-wing Zionists disliked his message; his critics on the young right objected to the venue. For the latter, appearing at NatCon Jerusalem amounted to jestermaxxing regardless of what he said. They saw him as courting Israel Firsters simply by sharing their stage.

So, while America First was pissed with Wolfe, Israel First was equally pissed.

NatCon has become radioactive because it is widely seen as nakedly an Israeli psyop, perhaps best explained by an astonishing admission from John Podhoretz in a recent podcast:

Thus, getting flown out to Jerusalem to share a stage with Hazony was itself grounds for suspicion and caused everyone to freak out.

What makes this episode interesting beyond OGC is what it suggests about the changing politics of Israel on the young right. It’s a microcosm. Those still defending Trump are dismissed as “Plan Trusters,” forever explaining why the latest betrayal is actually part of the 4D chess plan. They fire back with “Third Worldist,” accusing their critics of hating America because they hate its government’s support for Israel. Both camps insist they are the real America First, and both think the other has been conned.

One thing is clear: open ties to Israel are increasingly becoming a political liability, and Yoram Hazony is increasingly seen as a malignant tumor.

I wish LCS, NGS, and OGC well. You are all patriots who want America to thrive and throw off the yoke of foreign influence. That should count for more than these feuds. Argue about Trump, Israel, and political strategy as fiercely as you like, but NETTR should mean extending one another some charity before reaching for the knives. I hope you can all co-exist peacefully.

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My tweet quickly went viral, attracting nearly 700,000 views and prompting coverage from the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.

Now there’s another development.

The University of Oklahoma’s previously publicly accessible H-1B Labor Condition Application notices are now directing visitors to a university login portal.

The university’s official careers website still invites the public to review its current H-1B and E-3 filings. But when you click the link, instead of seeing the notices, you’re redirected to a login screen requesting an OU username and password.

This is now the fourth university to remove or restrict public access to its H-1B hiring notices following my reporting.

• Clemson University: After I exposed an H-1B Data Visualization Specialist position paying $68,340, Clemson removed its public H-1B notice page.

• New York University: After I posted their a Data Reference and Collections Librarian position paying $93,000, NYU’s public notices disappeared.

• University of Missouri: After I exposed an H-1B Strategic Communications Associate position paying $64,000, Mizzou’s public listings went from more than a dozen to zero. Missouri’s lieutenant governor subsequently called for a review of H-1B hiring.

  Chris Brunet

  Missouri Lieutenant Governor Launches H-1B Investigation Based on My Twitter Crusade

  If you have been following me on X, you know that for the past few years I have been obsessively tweeting out discriminatory Canada Research Chair postings…

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  6 months ago · 80 likes · 11 comments · Christopher Brunet

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I turned this breaking story into a Substack article because I believe it has the potential to become a national news story, especially given the White House’s new fraud task force. Please share it widely to help bring attention to it.

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Universities that rely on taxpayer funding should welcome public scrutiny of their hiring practices, not make it harder for the public to examine them. If these universities have nothing to hide, why are their hiring records becoming harder to access?

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UPDATE: the Inspector General chimes in:

I’m going to keep the family photos private, but we are overjoyed and both Mom and baby are healthy and happy. Fatherhood is already changing my priorities and, I suspect, will eventually change my writing. I can already feel myself becoming a little more grounded/mature/wiser. For those who have been subscribed to my Substack since I launched it 5 years ago, you have basically watched me grow up from unrooted, unhinged nomad to respectable family man.

Due to diaper duties I’ve gone from spending 10+ hours a day on the internet to barely 10 minutes some days, so please bear with me while I figure out how to be productive again.

That said, I haven’t stopped working. I have a few bigger investigations developing behind the scenes, and I expect to publish some major new scoops soon.

In the meantime, today’s article is a roundup of stories that caught my attention but didn’t quite warrant full articles of their own.

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#1: Former Journal of Marketing Editor Backs My Critique of Two Journal of Marketing Papers: “The Fatal Flaws in the Research Are Apparent”

My latest article is performing well, with 15k views on YouTube in the first week:

Today’s update: that investigation was turned into a LinkedIn newsletter by Professor Koen Pauwels, who has served as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Marketing.

That matters because, as you may recall, two of the papers I scrutinized were published in the Journal of Marketing and could now face retraction.

It is therefore a great boon to my argument that a scholar who served in an editorial role at that very journal is now publicly circulating my findings and describing the flaws in the research as “fatal.”

He concludes:

Several other professors chimed in in the comments section, e.g.:

#2: Department of War Orders Research Security Audits at 30 Academic Institutions

On August 17, the Department of War announced that it had ordered research-security audits at 30 American universities, including Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, Georgetown, Duke, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, NYU, and UCLA.

The audits are aimed at determining whether universities receiving federal defense funding are adequately protecting sensitive research from foreign interference (read: China), improper technology transfer (read: China), and other research-security risks (read: China).

#3: UT Austin quietly cuts ethnic, gender studies majors

Future students can no longer major in Women’s, Sexualities & Gender studies; Mexican American & Latina/o studies; African & African Diaspora studies as of fall 2027

#4: Revolt at GEB

Games and Economic Behavior is the top Game Theory journal in the world.

Last month Elsevier declined to renew the editor-in-chief’s contract.

All six other editors then resigned, followed by 58 of the 62 advisory editors.

Elsevier’s stated reason: “moving towards a closer alignment with Elsevier strategic priorities and publishing policies.”

If you know the inside story here, I feel like some details are missing, email me: chrisbrunet@protonmail.com

#5: EJMR Lawsuit

I found an old lawsuit that nobody else ever found.

502023ca002323xxxxmb 3 (1)

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The plaintiff was Dr. Douglas Cumming, then a professor at Florida Atlantic University and now at Stevens Institute of Technology. He sued several anonymous EJMR posters for libel and defamation after they accused him of corruption.

The problem was that he could not identify the Anonymous posters.

The case was eventually dismissed for that reason.

#6: Nathan Cofnas Takes a Victory Lap

Following my Arday/Cofnas coverage, Cofnas gave an absolutely hilarious and very autistic interview to Belgian state TV:

He then reached a deal with the Embassy to remain employed:

#7: Chile Goes Woke

The Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (@usantamaria) is hiring a professor of Mathematics… “Women Applicants Only”:

“This position is part of a special recruitment initiative aimed at increasing the participation of women. Applications are therefore invited exclusively from women candidates.”

#8: Bill Ackman Creates $1 Million Prize

Bill Ackman has launched a $1 million prize for academic truth-telling: the Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage.

This is a bit rich coming from Ackman. He is currently bankrolling Francesca Gino’s lawsuit against Data Colada, the researchers who documented data manipulation in her work and who, by his own criteria, look like stronger candidates for the prize.

#9: Francesca Gino tells her side of the story

Francesca Gino just gave her first major interview since Harvard revoked her tenure:

I confess I did not watch all 39 minutes, but the comments are overwhelmingly negative.

Her lawsuit is still ongoing.

The case is currently headed toward a trial scheduled for December.

#10: 1 in 12 Yale law grads get jobs as law professors

New law-school hiring data is out. 8.6% of Yale Law graduates became law professors. No other law school is even close. Stanford comes in second at just 2.6%, followed by Harvard at 2.0%, Chicago at 1.9%, and NYU at 1.5%.

In other words, a Yale Law graduate was more than three times as likely as a Stanford graduate and more than four times as likely as a Harvard graduate to end up in the legal academy.

Law School Docket

Which law schools produce the most law professors?

Professor Sarah Lawsky (Illinois) performs invaluable service to the legal academy by keeping track of law school hiring data, here. I thought I’d look at what schools produce the most law professors…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Derek T. Muller

#11: Journal Editorial Defending “Academic Freedom” Contains at Least Nine Fake References

In May, the coeditors of the Journal of Higher and Further Education, Anastasia Christou and Steve Lambert, along with deputy editor Rosalind Latiner Raby, published an editorial defending academic freedom and social-justice research.

There was just one problem: at least nine of the editorial’s 31 references are either nonexistent or contain false information, including fake articles, incorrect journal names, and scholars being credited with papers they never wrote.

• https://retractionwatch.com/2026/09/08/editors-of-higher-education-journal-coauthor-editorial-with-fake-references/

#12: Entire Editorial Board Quits After French Academic Journal Is Sold to China-Based Publisher

Another journal revolt.

All 15 editors of the French academic journal Revue de l’Organisation Responsable resigned after learning that its publishing and distribution rights had been transferred to CNBesting, an editing and publishing company with an address in Hangzhou, China.

The editors said they were informed only after CNBesting had already taken control of the journal.

Then came another surprise: the new publisher introduced a €1,350 publication fee. Previously, authors could publish in the journal for free.

The editors resigned en masse, saying they could no longer guarantee the journal’s “scientific and editorial integrity.”

• https://retractionwatch.com/2026/09/11/editors-of-french-journal-on-corporate-responsibility-resign-after-ownership-transfer/

#13: Harvard Is Selling AI Clones of Its Professors

The professors volunteered to be cloned, and Harvard worked with AI-avatar company HeyGen to create their digital counterparts.

#14: Vanderbilt Opens Campus in NYC

Weird. Vanderbilt is trying to change the idea of a university into something like an exclusive club with outposts around the world

And apparently this is only the beginning.

Vanderbilt is already planning another academic campus in San Francisco in 2027, pending regulatory approval.

#15: UChicago Is Becoming a Sausage Fest

This chart went viral last week:

The University of Chicago’s incoming classes have become dramatically more male. 58% of the Class of 2029 is male and just 42% is female, up from a nearly even 52–48 split only four years earlier.

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The paper examined data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), a proprietary index that measures customer satisfaction with major U.S. companies, and asked whether changes in those scores could be used to predict stock returns.

ACSI itself had been created at the University of Michigan in 1994 by a research team led by Claes Fornell, the lead author of the 2006 paper. In other words, Fornell was not an outside researcher testing someone else’s dataset. He created the metric whose ability to beat the market he was now studying.

The paper claimed that a trading strategy based on ACSI customer-satisfaction data had outperformed the S&P 500 every year tested, by a substantial margin.

2006 Jm

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That is an extraordinary claim.

Persistent, market-beating returns with lower risk are essentially the holy grail of investing. If the researchers had really discovered a durable source of alpha, the obvious question was why they were publishing it in a marketing journal rather than raising money and trading on it.

As it turns out, that is eventually exactly what they did.

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There was just one problem: it didn’t replicate.

WATCH THIS INVESTIGATION ON YOUTUBE:

First Failed Replication

The first major challenge came in 2009, when Christopher Ittner of Wharton and David Larcker and Daniel Taylor of Stanford published a commentary in Marketing Science reexamining whether ACSI data could actually be used to earn abnormal stock returns.

I reached out to this research team, and Daniel Taylor—the Arthur Andersen Chaired Professor at the Wharton School and director of the Wharton Forensic Analytics Lab—provided me with a direct assessment.

I am sure you are aware of (A) Gelman’s “Garden of Forking Paths,” (B) Data Colada’s “False Positive Psychology,” and (C) the Problem of Overfitting. Fornell et al. didn’t run standard multifactor asset pricing tests; didn’t use standard t-tests; and didn’t conduct out of sample tests. When you do, there is nothing there.

I don’t expect someone who is monetizing ACSI for their benefit to be able to conduct an unbiased study on the predictive value of ACSI scores. This is not unique to ACSI. I’d have the same criticism for academic studies of ESG and CSR where the author has a significant ESG/CSR consulting practice. Occasionally academics use journal publications as marketing tools to boost their existing consulting practice. That’s fine. But we shouldn’t pretend the publication presents an unbiased view.

Strictly speaking, this was not a line-by-line replication of the original paper. It was arguably more damaging: a methodological reexamination showing that the headline result was highly sensitive to the unusual choices used to produce it.

Ittner Larker Ms 2009

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Using what they described as more conventional methods from the accounting and finance literature, they found that the market appeared to incorporate major changes in customer satisfaction relatively quickly.

They also took aim at the peculiar construction of Fornell’s original trading strategy: the 2006 paper went long companies whose ACSI scores were above their competitors and had increased by at least two points, while taking short positions in companies whose scores were below competitors and had declined by at least two points. Ittner and his coauthors noted that Fornell et al. never explained why they chose the “arbitrary two-point cutoff.” They also pointed out that the long-run investment strategy combined ACSI levels with this arbitrary threshold, while the paper’s own short-term event study used a different methodology altogether.

When Ittner, Larcker, and Taylor instead sorted firms using changes in ACSI and tested more standard equal- and value-weighted portfolios over roughly three-month, six-month, and one-year holding periods, the spectacular returns disappeared. Moreover, the portfolio containing companies with the largest increases in customer satisfaction did not significantly outperform the portfolio containing those with the largest declines.

The authors then brought up the allegation of “aggressive data mining” — if the 2006 paper experimented with enough variables, thresholds, and definitions, eventually some strategy may appear to beat the market simply by chance.

Their bottom line was unusually clear: They found “no evidence that ACSI information can be used to earn abnormal long-run returns” and also that “we find no evidence that ACSI levels are associated with short-term returns.”

Second Failed Replication

A second challenge arrived the same year. In 2009, Robert Jacobson and Columbia Business School professor Natalie Mizik published “The Financial Markets and Customer Satisfaction: Reexamining Possible Financial Market Mispricing of Customer Satisfaction” in Marketing Science.

Jacobson Mizik 2009 Ms

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When Jacobson and Mizik reexamined the relationship using alternative portfolio constructions and risk-adjustment methods, they found that the supposed ACSI anomaly was “not widespread across the market.”

Instead, the statistically significant results were concentrated in just ten computer and Internet companies—including Apple, Dell, Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and Hewlett-Packard—which together accounted for only 8 percent of the sample observations. Once those firms were separated from the rest of the sample, there was no statistically significant relationship between customer satisfaction and future abnormal stock returns.

This distinction was crucial. The 2006 paper presented ACSI as evidence of a general market inefficiency. Jacobson and Mizik found something much narrower. The apparent anomaly was concentrated in a tiny group of technology and Internet stocks during the unusual 1995–2006 period encompassing the dot-com boom, bust, and aftermath.

Their conclusion was blunt: the alleged mispricing was “not widespread,” was “limited to firms in the computer and Internet sector,” and might “not be directly related to a customer-satisfaction based anomaly” at all. Instead, it could simply reflect the peculiar behavior of technology stocks during the dot-com era.

I reached out to Dr. Natalie Mizik, now a professor at the University of Washington, who gave me an extraordinary account of what happened behind the scenes.

Mizik said her team had gone considerably further than the version of their paper that was ultimately published. An earlier version, she told me, contained additional replication tests that “show[ed] step-by-step exactly why the early ACSI studies showed significant effects when there are none.” According to Mizik, that paper had already survived peer review, been accepted, and reached the page-proof stage when something unusual happened.

“From what I understand, Fornell (et al. ?) complained to the editor about our paper and the editor decided to reject this paper from the journal after it was accepted by [the] previous editor and was post-page proof stage and almost ready to be published.”

A substantially different version was eventually published.

Here are the two versions side by side:

Acsi Rejoin Mktgsci Jacobsonmizik

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Mksc

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The version that was eventually published in Mktg Sci with commentaries, including one by Ittner, Larcker, and Taylor, does not have the “Valuation of ACSI” (i.e., Value-relevance of ACSI) results, which I think are more important for mktg field (showing that any positive effects of improved customer satisfaction are fully incorporated into the current earnings and when you include current earnings surprised into the Return model, the ACSI metric itself does not have any incremental “value,” except in computer and internet sector, see p. 22 in .ppt). It only reports the “Mis-Valuation of ACSI” results, which is what you are interested in?

The reason(s) we didn’t find anything in the data were faulty estimation methods and data management (a handful of firms in the Internet sector driving sig results) in the early ACSI studies. And I have been puzzled and have no explanation as to why we were able to replicate the exact point-estimates, but got lower (and non-sig) T-stats compared to Aksoy et al. (2008) ACSI mispricing findings, see bottom of p. 815 and Footnote 2 in Jacobson and Mizik (MktgSci 2009). We followed their protocols for portfolio formation and had presumably the same data.

I have attached a .ppt I used for a presentation at NYU in 2007. It might be easier to follow to see how sig results are driven by a handful of Computer and Internet firms in the valuation and in the mis-pricing studies.

• VIEW: Powerpoint

This [article] from 2013 about bottom-ACSI firms outperforming might be answering your question of why ACSI ETF underperforms:

• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-17/proof-that-it-pays-to-be-americas-most-hated-companies (current)

I do not know what the exact portfolio formation rules are for ACSI ETF and whether past errors in the methods can explain their underperformance. The ACSI website says it is based on top ACSI score in the sector (but there might be something else they are doing and not disclosing the (minor) details, e.g., how sectors are defined, etc.) If it is just the level of ACSI, you can see on .ppt page 23 that the top and bottom 25% portfolios based on lagged ACSI scores have sig positive returns in the computer and internet sector. These results are not in the Mktg Sci paper because we tested the Aksoy ACSI portfolios with joined high ACSI + top ACSI growth rules.

She then pointed me toward an extraordinary episode I had missed: in 2003, the Wall Street Journal reported that Fornell had personally traded on privileged, nonpublic ACSI data before the scores were released to the public.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1045523742738726663

“It’s inappropriate for a public university to hold important information from the public,” said Mercer Bullard, a former assistant chief counsel at the SEC.

The University responded to the incident by stating its intent to investigate the situation according to University policies.

Business School Dean Robert Dolan also issued a written directive:

“I have instructed anyone affiliated with the ACSI not to make personal use of the information gathered in the course of producing the quarterly index, prior to the index’s release to the general public.”

Fornell said he would comply. From that point forward, he would no longer trade stocks covered by the ACSI before the index results were publicly released.

Third Failed Replication

The third replication is arguably the most direct. In 2009, Don O’Sullivan, Mark Hutchinson, and Vincent O’Connell published “Empirical Evidence of the Stock Market’s (Mis)pricing of Customer Satisfaction” in the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

Empirical Evidence On The Stock Market's Mispricing Of Customer Satisfaction

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Unlike Jacobson and Mizik, they specifically went back and tested the actual trading strategy proposed by Fornell et al. (2006). They used the same February 1997–May 2003 sample period and essentially the same portfolio-construction rules, but subjected the strategy to standard asset-pricing tests that the original paper had not performed. They adjusted returns for market risk, size, value, and momentum and formally tested whether the portfolios generated statistically significant abnormal returns using Jensen’s alpha.

The result was devastating.

The original Fornell paper had reported that its high-ACSI portfolio beat both the market and other ACSI companies. But O’Sullivan and his coauthors found no statistically significant abnormal returns under the market model, Fama-French model, or four-factor model. Their comparison table is explicit: Fornell et al. found “evidence of abnormal returns”; but this replication found “no evidence of abnormal returns.”

Even worse, they found the opposite conclusion: when the researchers then extended the sample through May 2006, the relationship started running in the wrong direction. The portfolio containing the bottom 20% of companies by ACSI score produced the highest returns.

And that was before accounting for trading costs. O’Sullivan et al. noted that roughly 70% of the ACSI portfolio had to be rebalanced every year, meaning brokerage costs, bid-ask spreads, and market impact would make the strategy look even worse in the real world.

Fourth Failed Replication

And there’s an extraordinary punchline from Bell, Ledoit & Wolf’s 2014 replication, “A New Portfolio Formation Approach to Mispricing of Marketing Performance Indicators: an Application to Customer Satisfaction.”

Bell 2014 Customer Needs Solutions

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Since one of the main criticisms of Fornell et al. was that they didn't test their strategy out of sample, this group tested ACSI-based strategies over 156 out-of-sample months from 1996/1997 through 2009, using multiple definitions of customer satisfaction and both annual and quarterly portfolio rebalancing.

The result was another failure.

With annual rebalancing, none of the t-statistics even exceeded 1.0, and the best annualized Sharpe ratio was below 0.25. With quarterly rebalancing, performance improved somewhat, but the strongest t-statistic was only about 1.8 and the best Sharpe ratio about 0.47—still short of either statistical or economic significance.

Then Bell and his coauthors performed an especially brutal robustness check: they gave their trading strategy perfect foresight of future ACSI scores. In other words, the portfolio got to know in advance which companies’ customer-satisfaction scores were about to rise or fall—information that an actual investor could not legally or practically possess.

Even that didn’t work. Not a single return was statistically significant, and the highest Sharpe ratio was below 0.32. As the authors put it, if even an “insider” trading strategy using future ACSI scores could not generate profitable portfolios, it was difficult to argue that customer satisfaction was being systematically mispriced by the stock market.

Their final conclusion was unambiguous: “We fail to find any convincing evidence for mispricing of customer satisfaction” and “There is no evidence for mispricing based on either statistical or economic significance.”

Fornell Doubles Down

It is rare enough for an academic paper to make an extraordinary claim that later fails repeated replication attempts. Rarer still is for the same researchers to return a decade later, in the same journal, and publish an even more extraordinary version of the original claim.

In 2016, Claes Fornell and Forrest Morgeson, now joined by G. Tomas M. Hult, returned to the Journal of Marketing with a paper: “Stock Returns on Customer Satisfaction Do Beat the Market.”

2016 Jm

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The paper explicitly presented itself as an answer to the failed replications. Fornell and his coauthors argued that enough time had now passed to settle the dispute empirically. If the critics were right, they reasoned, the extraordinary returns associated with their customer-satisfaction strategy should have disappeared as more out-of-sample data accumulated.

Instead, they claimed that the opposite had happened.

This is where, in my view, the evidence begins to raise the possibility of outright fraud.

The authors claimed that their ACSI trading strategy resulted in 518% returns versus just 31% for the S&P 500 over 15 years.

A fantastical result. An unbelievable result.

Their trading strategy that supposedly produced these 518% returns had one extraordinary catch: it was secret.

The evidence came from an actual investment fund founded and owned by Fornell himself — who acknowledged that the fund “does not include formulaic trading rules,” meaning the crucial investment decisions were discretionary and undisclosed. Without knowing the rules for stock selection, position sizing, timing, turnover, risk controls, and other trading decisions, outside researchers cannot reconstruct the portfolio. And if they cannot reconstruct the portfolio, they cannot determine whether customer satisfaction actually generated the extraordinary returns.

Even That Didn’t Replicate! Three More Times!

Fornell’s 2016 victory lap — where he claimed to achieve 518% returns, vs. just 31% for the SP500 — c’mon — did not end the controversy.

In the very same issue of the Journal of Marketing, two separate teams published responses questioning whether his extraordinary returns could actually be attributed to customer satisfaction.

Sundar G. Bharadwaj and Debanjan Mitra, in “Satisfaction (Mis)pricing Revisited: Real? Really Big?”, argued that Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult had still not resolved the theoretical and empirical problems necessary to establish customer satisfaction as a genuine asset-pricing anomaly.

Jm 2016 Bhardwaj

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This paper identifies many “caveats that could affect the robustness of [Fornell’s] conclusion.”

1. The results critically depend on the manner in which industry is defined.

2. Because Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult use a proprietary trading strategy that has not been disclosed to the general public, the authors are unable to discern what fraction of their reported performance is due to customer satisfaction as opposed to other characteristics of the trading strategy.

3. Because the authors also find positive abnormal returns for the entire American Customer Satisfaction Index sample, at least some of the performance reported by Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult might be driven by sample characteristics unrelated to customer satisfaction.

4. Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult do not consider alternative theoretical bases of their mispricing results.

5. Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult combine satisfaction and change in satisfaction. They indicate that stocks were purchased both before and after the ACSI announcement.

6. Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult’s results are based on a small number of firms

   that are selected arguably not at random. Often it is not clear

   how ACSI chooses to include or exclude firms.

More damaging was the next paper, “Customer Satisfaction and Long-Term Stock Returns,” by Texas A&M professors Alina Sorescu and Sorin M. Sorescu.

2016 Sorescu Jm

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Their analysis could not reproduce Fornell’s spectacular fund performance because his “proprietary trading strategy had not been disclosed to the general public. Therefore, we are not able to discern what fraction of the performance reported by [Fornell] is due to customer satisfaction” as opposed to whatever else was hidden inside the secret trading strategy.

The failures did not stop there.

In 2020, Ashwin Malshe, Anatoli Colicev, and Vikas Mittal revisited Fornell’s results in How Main Street Drives Wall Street: Customer (Dis)satisfaction, Short Sellers, and Abnormal Returns.

Malshe Colicev Mittal 2020 How Main Street Drives Wall Street Customer (dis)satisfaction, Short Sellers, And Abnormal Returns (1)

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After reviewing the literature, the authors concluded that the relationship between customer satisfaction and abnormal returns was “not as well established as some may believe,” noting that prior studies had found positive, zero, and negative results.

Malshe and his coauthors went considerably further than a simple portfolio comparison. The econometric procedure was:

• They split the sample into firms for which ACSI scores were reported and firms for which they were not.

• They then re-estimated their full “main model” separately on each subsample.

• The estimator was a multiple-equation Conditional Mixed Process (CMP), a maximum-likelihood framework that jointly models their selection equation, short interest equation, and abnormal-return equation. The main paper says CMP accommodates correlated errors across equations, different dependent-variable types, selection correction, and multilevel effects.

• They used heteroskedasticity-corrected standard errors.

• They did not simply use raw levels. Their main specification transforms variables into “unexpected changes” using AR(1) models and uses the residual innovations in the econometric model.

• They also use control-function corrections for potential endogeneity, based on peer-of-peer instruments, plus a battery of controls.

The final result really is ugly for ACSI. In Table W19, for firms covered by ACSI, customer satisfaction has a coefficient of −0.0062 (SE .006) on short interest and customer dissatisfaction 0.0212 (SE .019)—neither statistically significant. More importantly, the direct coefficients on abnormal returns are also nonsignificant: customer satisfaction is 0.0034 (SE .060) and dissatisfaction is 0.0738 (SE .155).

The authors conclude:

“Importantly, the effect is nonsignificant for firms covered in the ACSI.”

That goes directly at the heart of Fornell’s claim. His 2006 and 2016 papers argued that customer satisfaction, measured using ACSI, could generate abnormal stock returns and beat the market. Yet, using newer data and more well-identified econometric methodology, Malshe and his coauthors found no statistically significant effect.

Their appendix is actually far more damaging to Fornell than the main paper. Rather than merely discussing the mixed replication literature, it directly asks the question that matters for Fornell’s investment thesis: does an ACSI-based strategy actually generate abnormal returns?

Jmr

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The answer is overwhelmingly negative.

The authors assemble 49 market-neutral estimates from eight studies. The average t-statistic is just 0.869, and only five of the 49 estimates are positive and statistically significant at the 5% level. Against that backdrop, Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult’s 2016 finding looks less like a representative result than a glaring outlier. They reported 0.9% alpha per month with p ≤ .001—and the appendix explicitly notes that this is by far the largest outlier reported anywhere in the literature.

The entire literature says the opposite of what Fornell et al. says.

Commercialization

Then the fatally flawed academic claim became a financial product.

The timing is remarkable:

• August 5, 2016: the ACSI ETF prospectus is filed with the SEC. It states that “Mr. Claes Fornell has a controlling interest in the Adviser and ACSI.”

• September 1, 2016: Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult publish “Stock Returns on Customer Satisfaction Do Beat the Market,” claiming that their trading strategy generated 518% returns.

• October 31, 2016: The ACSI ETF launches.

Fornell’s ACSI ETF charged a 0.65% annual management fee, compared with an average of 0.14% for other similar ETFs, making ACSI roughly 4.6 times more expensive than the industry average… meaning a claim that had not survived replication was now being marketed as an investment strategy, with investors paying a substantially inflated premium to access it.

Investors are paying through the nose for a financial product built on research that appears to be fraudulent junk science.

ACSI ETF Underperforms the S&P 500

Nearly ten years after its launch, we can now test the commercial version of the ACSI thesis against actual market performance.

The results look remarkably different from the academic claims.

Remember: in 2016, Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult reported that their customer-satisfaction trading strategy had generated 518% in cumulative returns, compared with just 31% for the S&P 500, with estimated annual alpha of roughly 8% to 11%.

Then the ACSI ETF launched.

According to the fund's own website, from its October 31, 2016 inception through July 31, 2026:

Rather than beating the S&P 500 by 8-11%per year, the actual ACSI ETF has lagged it by roughly 2.6% per year since inception. Thus, nearly a decade of live, out-of-sample performance shows that Fornell’s ACSI thesis has not held up: the financial product built around it underperformed the market, exactly as the replication literature predicted.

One replication in particular examined the ETF almost immediately after launch. In the 2020 Journal of Marketing Research appendix discussed above, Malshe, Colicev, and Mittal explicitly treated the ACSI ETF as a real-world test of Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult’s 2016 strategy. They contrasted the paper’s claimed 0.9% monthly alpha with the ETF’s actual performance and concluded that it had generated “0% abnormal return before fees.” After accounting for the fund’s expense ratio, they wrote that “the strategy is losing money.”

So, even six years ago, the failed ACSI ETF performance was already glaring.

Today, that early warning has hardened into a decade-long track record of failure.

Journal of Marketing Responds

According to multiple experts I spoke with, problems with this research have been known within academic marketing for years. But a decade ago, researchers were far less willing to openly discuss the possibility of serious research misconduct than they are today. Cases such as Francesca Gino at Harvard and Dan Ariely at Duke have fundamentally changed that conversation.

What makes the ACSI story especially serious is that the stakes extend far beyond the academic literature. If the underlying research is ultimately shown to involve serious misconduct, then potentially unreliable findings did not merely accumulate citations—they helped underpin a commercial investment strategy and a broader business built around the claim that customer satisfaction can predict superior stock returns. Today, more than $100 million is invested in an ETF whose intellectual foundation rests on those claims.

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Several marketing scholars I have spoken with privately believe the relevant papers warrant retraction or formal investigation. I have contacted the Journal of Marketing editorial board to initiate that process.

At minimum, the Journal of Marketing and the institutions involved should now conduct a formal review of the underlying data, methods, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Investors, researchers, and the public deserve to know whether a lucrative financial product was built on a fatally flawed academic claim—and whether its creators sold investors on that claim after serious doubts about its validity were already impossible to ignore.

I have heard that the new Editor, Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, is high on data accuracy and has set up several scholars to act. I contacted him with an advance copy of this article and asking if they would open an investigation or retract Fornell’s papers. He responded:

I also want to flag what seems like a direct conflict between the Journal of Marketing’s current standards and the Fornell et al. (2016) paper. In their March 25, 2026 editorial, “Cementing JM’s Impact on the Marketing Ecosystem: Empirical Execution,” they wrote:

That makes the 2016 paper particularly difficult to reconcile with the journal’s current standards—and, at minimum, provides a strong basis for a formal investigation into whether correction or retraction is warranted.

Fornell Responds

I sent Fornell this list of failed replications and asked a direct question:

He provided me with the following statement in response:

Fornell’s explanation offers a hypothesis for why the ETF’s live performance differs so dramatically from the returns reported in the academic research. It does not resolve the central question raised by this article: why the extraordinary abnormal returns reported in the original ACSI research repeatedly disappeared under independent examination, or how outside researchers can validate the 518% result when the trading strategy that produced it remains undisclosed.

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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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2 months 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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9 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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5 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

5 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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5 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…

Listen now

5 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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