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Coffee Break: Delusion, Deception and Dipshittery: Hasbara on the 8th Front

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The western powers seem to be making competing desperate bids to maintain narrative control, and it is very hard to parse the difference between deliberate deception, delusion, and what is just plain dipshittery.

I’ll talk about Europe and the Trump’s administration’s efforts in future posts, but this post will look at Israel’s efforts on what Alistair Crook calls their “8th front:” their battle to control the narrative in the United States. Crook also insists they are losing in that battle. The Times of Israel agrees.

Also a note re the sourcing and quotes in this post. The narrative is being contested online. It’s been my practice to use X.com (formerly Twitter) and YouTube to monitor other social media such as Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, Twitch, etc.

Much of this story is being contested on Twitter so this post features a higher than usual % of Twitter embeds, apologies if that’s inconvenient for you. If you’d like me to quote from the tweets separately please let me know in the comments.

I’m also embedding tweets from a variety of sources, embeds are not endorsements. Some of these accounts are anonymous and none of them (or any source) should ever be trusted implicitly, nor are they necessarily “allies” of this community (if there is such a thing). I’ve tried to select relevant sources and well-documented posts that advance the story I’m trying to tell.

Israel’s desperate push to maintain narrative control in the U.S.

Many are, including the President of Iran, anticipating a renewed Israeli attack on Iran and support for Israel plummeting in the U.S., especially among Democrats and young people, including young Republicans.

Understandably, these two factors have Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu ramping up his efforts to control the narrative in America.

Tucker Carlson went on Glenn Greenwald’s Rumble channel and claimed that Netanyahu is “going around the Middle East” and bragging that he controls the U.S. and Donald Trump.

This is not the behavior of a secure player, confident in his powers. This is the voice of dangerous desperation, delusion and maybe some dipshittery too.

Bibi’s has also been meeting with influencers and bragging openly about Israel’s control of TikTok (via the Oracle acquisition) and X.com.

I’ll quote the Aaron Mate tweet that he used to introduce the below: “Liberals and many progressives spent years fixated on mythical Russian oligarchs controlling US democracy and equally mythical “Russian interference” flooding our information system.

“All along, the actual foreign interference was right in front of their dupe faces:”

Influencer Dipshittery

While not as important as the TikTok deal, Netanyahu has also embarked on an “influencer-heavy” approach to influencing young American public opinion.

Not only do social media influences reach a multiple of Americans under 35 than that reached by the MSM, influencers are also often ignorant of politics and sometimes utterly amoral and therefore happy to sign up to support genocide.

Bibi recently hosted a number of American influencers. The Prime Minister of Israel official X account tweeted Bibi’s trophy shots from the meeting:

Naturally online critics of Israel were quick to document which influencers Bibi got to, here’s one effort by a right-wing X user (the thread on X includes later additions):

Some of these people are real gems:

Different Emily but this one got right to work cranking out real cringe on behalf of Bibi, she’s also hooked up with Hollywood agents:

We’ll have more from Max on Israel’s Hollywood moves further down in the post.

But I wanted to share one more seeming fail from another of Bibi’s newly activated influencers, social media is not sending their best:

There’s also the very important matter of getting the right person in the Turning Point USA frontman role once filled by Charlie Kirk.

Let’s not forget that Netanyahu was one of the first to post about the death of Kirk, with a very polished tweet, written on a day when Israel was engaged in military attacks on seven neighbors.

He’s since gone on to deny that Israel had any role in Kirk’s death:

The massively popular libertarian comic Tim Dillon discussed Bibi’s denials with Max Blumenthal:

Ben Shapiro is running the show at TPUSA. He was quick to announce it, in terms of “picking up the blood-stained mic”, posting on September 11, the day after Kirk’s death.

He’s been accused of buying that controlling role at the organization, a move that was sewed up by September 15.

Given that Shapiro’s Daily Wire has allegedly been declining in viewership (Google trends) since he lost Candace Owens over her opposition to Gaza, but he needs a fresh gentile face to be a credible frontman for the young MAGA crowd:

Hollyhand also appears backed by staffers for some notorious AIPAC US Congressmen:

And Hollyhand really needs to be seen directly to be believed. He reeks of the cultural tropes of the Old South aristocracy (ie the slave lords), a caste that has wealth and power but hasn’t had significant cultural influence in the U.S. since the Civil War:

At the University of Texas we’d describe someone like Hollyhand as “putting off strong Kappa Alpha, Birmingham chapter, vibes.”

UPDATE: Hollyhand might be overstating his relationship with TPSUA.

Hollywood Hasbara

And it’s not just influencers, there is plenty of work to be done on the MSM side and Israel has been busy there, too. Max Blumenthal tweeted a list of “Hollywood hasbara”:

Paramount is all in, there’s this documentary:

And a new mini-series on October 7, per The Hollywood Reporter:

Paramount+ has released the harrowing first trailer for an upcoming four-part limited series depicting the Oct. 7, 2023 tragedy in Israel.

The project is titled Red Alert and it portrays the largest and deadliest massacre in Israel’s history, when more than 1,200 concert-goers, families and individuals near the Gaza border were murdered and 250 were kidnapped by Hamas. The show’s production credits include Pulp Fiction producer Lawrence Bender and Homeland producer Keshet Media Group.

Red Alert is “draws from the true experiences of those who survived and weaves their courageous personal stories into a cinematic narrative of the devastating terrorist attack that turned southern Israel into a war zone, testing humanity and forging heroism through chaos.”

Kirk’s death has slowed at least one Hollywood hasbara effort, per the New York Times:

Apple TV+ has postponed the release of its show “The Savant,” starring Jessica Chastain as an undercover investigator who infiltrates online hate groups to stop mass shootings. The show was set to begin streaming its first two episodes on Friday.

Apple did not give a reason for its postponement, which it announced on Tuesday, saying in a brief statement only that the decision was made after “careful consideration.” It did not announce a new release date.

Two people with knowledge of the discussions said that the company was reluctant to release the show in the current political climate, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk this month.

The most important of all: Oracle, Paramount, and TikTok

I’ll close with what I opened with, the importance to Netanyahu and Israel of the new TikTok ownership.

Israel is currently being blamed for the wave of anti-Chinese propaganda that provided the ostensible reason for last year’s U.S. Congressional vote to ban TikTok unless it changed owners:

We also must discuss the role of Larry Ellison, David Ellison and the new Oracle nepo-ownership of Paramount in pulling that off.

Wired is quoting “a Trump advisor” who calls Larry Ellison, a “Shadow president”:

In an age where human attention is perhaps the world’s most valuable commodity, the Ellisons could be in charge of almost everything a modern-day pseudo robber barron could want by the end of this year or soon after. I spoke with sources who have dealt with Ellison—as well as others who know his son, David—to get a sense of how he operates. And he operates a lot lately…

There’s his pending dominance over vertical video with a key role in the proposed new ownership consortium for the US version of TikTok, for which Oracle’s servers already provide hosting. There’s airwave domination, with a news and entertainment behemoth under his son’s control following the merger of David’s Skydance and Paramount—which might possibly include the keys to not only CBS, but also CNN, if Skydance actually puts in a bid and succeeds in a potential acquisition of Warner Brothers-Discovery. The empire spans from the sweaty floor of the octagon after acquiring US broadcast rights to the Ultimate Fighting Championship (also under Paramount) all the way to the clay soil of Abilene, Texas, home of OpenAI’s Stargate data center project led by Oracle and Softbank. Oracle is also linked to a $100 billion deal with Nvidia and OpenAI announced Monday.

The Ellison family is cornering the market on attention and data the way the Vanderbilts did railroads and the Rockefellers did oil.

I’ve posted previously about Ellison, Oracle, Paramount, Israel, and the Trump administration.

I’ve also previously posted about the role of the Trump administration in pressuring Paramount’s previous owner Shari Redstone to sell to the Ellisons.

I’ve also cited the work of The MMA Draw which explained the role of Ellison ally Ari Emanuel in getting Trump to support that move.

Emanuel is a top Trump insider, a combat sports multi-monopolist (mixed martial arts, pro wrestling, and moving to take over boxing), Hollywood power broker, and brother of Democratic presidential aspirant Rahm Emanuel.

Emanuel is also at the center of a web of financiers that is deeply involved in the new Paramount, per Zach Arnold at The MMA Draw:

Ari Emanuel is focused entirely on controlling the politics and the plumbing of media pipes. He has deep ties to ESPN & Netflix. There are still ties with NBCUniversal. And now Paramount is on the table.

Since the take-private of Endeavor, Gerry Cardinale of Redbird Capital has emerged as Ari Emanuel’s key financial muscle. Redbird Capital is a principle investor in Skydance, the Larry & David Ellison shop that is taking over Paramount from Shari Redstone.

Guess who is now going to be running management in Paramount? Guess who’s going to be on Paramount’s Board of Directors?

Andy Gordon, former heavyweight from Goldman Sachs, is now COO and Chief Strategist (Redbird) at Paramount. Justin Hamill, Chief Legal Officer of Silver Lake, is going to be on Paramount’s BOD. Silver Lake and Mubadala are the main financiers behind Endeavor.

Heads, Ari wins; tails, you lose. That’s how this works.

Mubadala is the UAE’s financial vehicle and Silver Lake (which owns most of WME Group, the parent company of Emanuel’s fight empire TKO) is reportedly to be Oracle’s new partner in the TikTok acquisition:

A group of three investors, including Oracle and private-equity firm Silver Lake, will take a roughly 50% stake in TikTok U.S., a source familiar with the deal said on Thursday.

A group of existing shareholders in TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, will hold a roughly 30% stake, the source said. Among ByteDance’s current investors are Susquehanna International Group, General Atlantic and KKR.
…
CNBC reported earlier that Abu Dhabi-based MGX, Oracle and Silver Lake are poised to be the main investors in TikTok U.S. with a combined 45% ownership, citing sources.

MGX did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the CNBC report.

MGX is an artificial intelligence investment firm and a partner of Silver Lake, and falls under the purview of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser and brother of the President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

The AI and surveillance delusions of Larry Ellison

It’s fairly well established that Israeli PM Netanyahu is delusional on many topics whether it’s Israel’s status as a world power, Israel’s ability to cut off trade with Egypt, or his vision of Israel as a autarkic “Super-Sparta.”

I do want to highlight the fundamental desperation that is driving Netanyahu, as Imran Khalid ably described in May:

By now, it should surprise no one that Benjamin Netanyahu prefers the echo chamber of his own making to the international chorus demanding accountability. The Israeli prime minister, clinging to office as tenaciously as he clings to delusion, has managed to place himself among the most cynically manipulative leaders of our time, a man who governs not by vision, but by vindictiveness.

Once vaunted as a statesman in the mold of Churchill, Netanyahu now more closely resembles a bunker-dwelling autocrat, lashing out at allies and adversaries alike as his credibility collapses under the weight of his own contradictions.
…
Netanyahu thrives in crisis, not to resolve it but to prolong it, using chaos as a shield against the ever-looming specter of his own political demise. With corruption charges still dogging him and public opinion slipping, he has fashioned Gaza into both a battlefield and a diversion.
…
He is a leader in free fall, dragging his country with him, increasingly abandoned by allies, and yet still believing himself the indispensable man. The tragedy is not only his. It belongs to Israel—and to all those, Palestinian and Israeli alike, who must live with the consequences of his delusions.

But I’d rather focus on some of the delusions and desperation that may be driving Larry Ellison.

First, he’s becoming quite well known as one of the leading spokesmen (alongside Palantir’s Alex Karp and Peter Thiel) for a vision of security through surveillance:

The above may be deception rather than delusion, but if so, Ellison is revealing a great deal about himself to the public and its being widely used against him and his allies (I’ll discuss the backlash to Oracle’s role in the UK’s just announced Digital ID plan in my next post tomorrow morning).

As for the desperation, well Oracle is taking out billions of dollars in debt to pay for their AI aspirations, per Yahoo Finance on Sept. 24:

Oracle Corp. sold $18 billion US investment-grade bonds on Wednesday, the market’s second-largest deal this year, as the software maker ramps up its spending to meet the needs of the artificial intelligence boom.

Demand peaked at nearly $88 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The technology giant — which has nearly doubled in value this year — is issuing debt in six parts, including a rare 40-year bond, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified discussing private details. That note will yield 1.37 percentage points above similarly dated Treasuries, compared with initial price talk of about 1.65 percentage points.

A floating-rate tranche was dropped during syndication.

The debt raise comes as Oracle begins to fulfill massive cloud infrastructure deals with customers like OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc., which are boosting the company’s expenses. Over the next several years, it is projected to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to rent and power data centers.

It is also the cloud provider to TikTok in the US, and under a new framework outlined by the White House earlier this week, it would help oversee the development of a new US-only version of the social media giant’s algorithm.

The software company spent years trailing the top three vendors — Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google — in the competitive cloud infrastructure market. Now that it has struck serious cloud deals, it’s on the hook for upfront costs. Oracle’s cash flow flipped negative this year for the first time since 1992. Analysts anticipate the metric will be in free fall over the coming years before returning to positive in 2029.

Oracle and OpenAI announced a $300 billion cloud deal on September 10 (that was truly a historic day) that initially goosed Oracle’s stock price significantly.

The Wall Street Journal had the scoop:

OpenAI signed a contract with Oracle to purchase $300 billion in computing power over roughly five years, people familiar with the matter said, a massive commitment that far outstrips the startup’s current revenue.

The deal is one of the largest cloud contracts ever signed, reflecting how spending on AI data centers is hitting new highs despite mounting concerns over a potential bubble.

The Oracle contract will require 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity, roughly comparable to the electricity produced by more than two Hoover Dams or the amount consumed by about four million homes.

Oracle shares surged by as much as 43% on Wednesday after the cloud company revealed it added $317 billion in future contract revenue during its latest quarter that ended in Aug. 31. Chief Executive Safra Catz told analysts that it had signed contracts with three different customers during the quarter.

The share price surge increased Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison’s wealth by more than $100 billion, pushing him into the range of Elon Musk as the world’s richest person, with a net worth of almost $400 billion.

The OpenAI and Oracle contract, which starts in 2027, is a risky gamble for both companies. OpenAI is a money-losing startup that disclosed in June it was generating roughly $10 billion in annual revenue—less than one-fifth of the $60 billion it will have to pay on average every year. Oracle is concentrating a large chunk of its future revenue on one customer—and will likely have to take on debt to buy the AI chips needed to power the data centers.

Ed Zitron ripped the deal, calling it “full of crap”:

Analysts fawned over Oracle — again, as it missed estimates — with TD Cowen’s Derrick Wood saying it was a “momentous quarter” (again, it missed) and that these numbers were “really amazing to see,” and Guggenheim Securities’ John DiFucci said he was “blown away.” Deutsche Bank’s Brad Zelnick added that “[analysts] were all kind of in shock, in a very good way.”

RPOs, while standard (and required) accounting practice and based on actual signed contracts, are being used by Oracle as a form of marketing. Plans change, contracts can be canceled (usually with a kill fee, but nevertheless), and, especially in this case, clients can either not have the money to pay or die for the very same reason they can’t pay. In Oracle’s case, it isn’t simply promising ridiculous growth, it is effectively saying it’ll become the dominant player in all cloud compute.

Oracle claims that it will make $18 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in FY2026, $32 billion in FY2027, $73 billion in FY2028, $114 billion in FY2029, and $144 billion in FY2030. While all of this isn’t necessarily OpenAI (as it adds up to $381 billion), it’s fair to assume that the majority of it is.

This means — as the $300 billion of the $317 billion of new contracts added by Oracle, and assuming OpenAI makes up 78% of its cloud infrastructure revenue ($300 billion out of $381 billion) — that OpenAI intends to spend over $88 billion fucking dollars in compute by FY2029, and $110 billion dollars in compute, AKA nearly as much as Amazon Web Services makes in a year, in FY2030.

Now that stock price froth is beginning to fade with a 16% drop in Oracle’s share price last week, per Technobezz:

Sometimes the market’s most beloved darlings get hit the hardest when reality comes knocking. Oracle just learned this lesson the hard way, watching its stock price plummet 16% from recent highs as analysts started asking uncomfortable questions about those sky-high AI promises.

The damage started this week when Rothschild & Redburn analyst Alex Haissl dropped a bombshell coverage initiation, slapping Oracle with a rare “Sell” rating and a $175 price target. That’s not just pessimistic – it’s predicting roughly 40% downside from current levels. According to The Motley Fool, shares that were trading above $308 just days ago have already tumbled to around $291, and according to multiple analyst reports, this might just be the beginning.

Here’s what’s got Wall Street spooked: Oracle has floated aggressive targets for cloud growth, with executives outlining a path for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue to reach about $18 billion this fiscal year and scale toward $144 billion by fiscal 2030. That’s ambitious against the company’s most recent quarter showing total revenue of $15.9 billion and cloud services and license support of $11.7 billion.

The numbers tell a more nuanced story than Oracle’s executives might prefer. While the company did post respectable 11% revenue growth in Q4, with cloud services jumping 14% to $11.7 billion, the valuation has gotten completely divorced from fundamentals. According to Seeking Alpha analysts, Oracle now trades at a forward P/E ratio of 41-46 – compare that to the industry median of 29, or even Nvidia’s 50 (despite Nvidia’s 50%+ revenue growth rate).

That disconnect becomes even more stark when you consider the broader context. A recent MIT study found that 95% of companies investing in generative AI have yet to see any financial returns. Yet Oracle’s stock had been riding high on promises of triple-digit growth in its multicloud revenue, with CEO Larry Ellison boasting about building 47 new data centers in the next 12 months.

The confluence of the AI bubble, the rot economy, what I’ve called “The Interregnum of Unreality” with Israel’s desperate, deceptive, delusional attempts to control the American political system shows how the polycrisis impacts everyone.

I’d like to justify my focus on Larry Ellison’s role in this process by referencing an insight from a DropSite News writer Waqas on X who was discussing the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Israel, but I think it’s apropos for Ellison as well:

Epstein himself was a supranational entity floating above it all with access to networks and finance that is impossible to put together by a single individual.

If you consider Israel a proper country and a nation, you would fall into the trap of thinking that Epstein worked for Mossad, working for the interests of Israel.

But consider this for a second and redo your calculations just to see if it makes sense:

Israel is not a regular country, it is an entity that exists to provide sovereign cover to a network of billionaires and allows them a financial and regulatory home base that can circumvent international laws and local laws in other countries. Even ordinary Israeli citizens are victims of and are being used by this entity.

In this system, Epstein is a part of a network that all these people named in the emails are also a part of. They make international deals on behalf of each other and share resources. Israel is a sub structure that allows all this. Mossad then is just an intelligence arm of this loose confederation of billionaires.

I’ll continue this mini-series tomorrow morning with a look at the delusion, deception and dipshittery involved with the information war being fought by the EU, the UK, and Ukraine to control the European population and keep the US deeply involved on their increasingly irrelevant subcontinent.

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3 comments

  1. barefoot charley

    Anecdata to your last point, Nat: a good decade ago my silly sister invested in a scam spun out of illegal sports betting websites on Cyprus that evolved into stock price-calling on a daily-weekly-whatever basis, where you guess if a price would go up or down, period, called binary options trading. This industry became somewhat regulated on Cyprus, so it moved to Israel, where its practices were spread around the world by immigrants who spoke no Hebrew, but knew how to sell bubbles and BS back home. Tel Aviv was the capital of this industry, and its only regulation was that it was illegal for salesmen to sell to Israelis. That’s it. As long as the calls were international, no regs. It’s a cute, minor example of the service system DropSite describes. I guess it’s true, it sure worked on my sister (who’d dragged me in too because I wanted to show my love . . .) Yes, we lost everything, then our salesman ‘died.’

    Reply ↓
  2. lyman alpha blob

    I’d like to think that judging by their crappy accounting software, Oracle won’t be a dominant player in anything. But that software enjoys a 5-10% market share in its industry and I know of at least one company that gladly overpaid millions of dollars to install it. Are Tiktok watchers savvier than CEOs and will they know crap when they see it, and tune out? A guy can dream.

    On a somewhat positive note, now that Ellison has swallowed up CNN, it might be a little easier to convince a few holdouts I know that CNN is in fact a propaganda network, and not a middle of the road independent news source.

    Reply ↓
  3. hk

    Obviously not shown in any of these (esp not propaganda flicks/stuff coming out of Hollywood thst is): IDF gunships massacring more Jews than ever around 10/7 since SS was still active…

    Reply ↓

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