90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, January 30, 2021

Elon Musk takes on Dem’s Wall Street, & suddenly DoJ probes his SpaceX

Retail investors are taking short sellers to the cleaners at least for now, and Elon Musk is enjoying it all. As he’s enjoying it, suddenly, we find out the DoJ is probing SpaceX.

The Tesla CEO has been sparring with Wall Street bears for years. This week, he has leveraged Twitter TWTR -2.02% to help fuel the populist frenzy over GameStop Corp. GME 67.87% and other companies to stick it to the short sellers once more, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“Here come the shorty apologists. Give them no respect. Get Shorty,” Mr. Musk tweeted Thursday to his more than 40 million followers.

On Wednesday, GameStop shares more than doubled after Mr. Musk tweeted “Gamestonk!!” the previous afternoon, linking to the popular Reddit forum WallStreetBets. Stonk is a play on the word “stock.”

THEN CAME THE FEDS

Coincidentally, today, we learn that the Department of Justice is investigating Elon Musk’s SpaceX after it was accused of discriminating against non-U.S. citizens in its hiring process.

Court documents reveal that a non-U.S. citizen filed a complaint at the DOJ’s Immigrant and Employee Rights (IER) division alleging that Musk’s aerospace company discriminated against him based on his citizenship status, CNBC reported.

One non-US citizen? And that brings in the Feds who can’t find a coup whipping around them?

Is he illegal?

“The charge alleges that on or about March 10, 2020, during the Charging Party’s interview for the position of Technology Strategy Associate, SpaceX made inquiries about his citizenship status and ultimately failed to hire him for the position because he...

REPORT: Google Deleted Nearly 100,000 Negative Ratings From Robinhood

Google reportedly deleted nearly 100,000 negative reviews from the investment app Robinhood on the Google Play store Thursday.

Google confirmed to The Verge that they removed the bad reviews, which were enough to bring the total star rating down to one star. A screenshot posted by the outlet showed Robinhood with nearly 275,000 reviews and a one-star rating, then another screenshot later Thursday showed the app with about 180,000 reviews and a four-star rating.

The company “combines human intelligence with machine learning to detect and enforce policy violations in ratings and reviews,” it told The Verge. Robinhood does not have the ability to delete reviews themselves, and Google deleted reviews that were in violation of its policies, the company said.

The influx of negative reviews came after Robinhood halted the ability to buy stocks in Gamestop and other companies Thursday morning. Hedge funds and Wall Street executives had heavily shorted Gamestop – meaning that they bet that the stock would go down – because they believed the company would have trouble adapting to digital video games. Users on the Reddit page WallStreetBets discovered that the stock had been widely shorted and were able to increase the price of the stock by over 600%, costing the hedge funds billions.

Robinhood is now facing a class-action lawsuit from investors who say that halting the purchase of some stocks put them at an unfair disadvantage and violated the...

When Resistance Became Sedition and Sedition Became Resistance

Republicans failed to punish Obama’s national security abuses. Biden’s abuses will be worse.

In 2008, “dissent” went from being the “highest form of patriotism”, a quote by Communist revisionist historian Howard Zinn that Democrats falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson, to treason when George W. Bush made way for Barack H. Obama. The old bumper stickers about the patriotic value of dissent were swiftly replaced with others touting the value of change.

In 2020, resistance just as quickly turned into sedition once the political tables were turned.

In one month, questioning a presidential election went from a commonplace proposition to a shocking attack on our democracy. And we all know that if President Trump had been inaugurated for a second term, there would be no censorship or censure of the Democrat politicians and pundits claiming that he was only reelected because of Russia or UFOs.

Nor would we be hearing any talk of “sedition” and “insurrection” as if they were bad things.

When November was just decorating the flagstones of D.C. with faded leaves, the Democrat cliques inside federal agencies were still touting their skill at undermining the White House in chats with reporters at bars where drinks cost more than most Americans earn in a day.

These members of the “resistance” had spent four years undermining elected officials while falsely claiming that they were entitled to do it because the 2016 election had been illegitimate.

Government officials boasted anonymously of undermining President Trump, members of Congress and their staffers helped protesters get inside to disrupt hearings, rioters who assaulted police officers and attacked federal buildings were bailed out by Democrat officials and celebrities who enlisted Silicon Valley and major corporations to support the riots.

By the time November was done, resistance had been rebranded as “sedition”. Storming Capitol Hill went from a passionate endeavor by Democrat activists protesting the Kavanaugh nomination, the environment, or some other lefty cause, to the single worst event since 9/11.

Black Lives Matter riots had besieged the White House and set fire to its guardhouse, while still being defended by Democrats and the media as peaceful protesters. The media agonized over photos of federal agents protecting the Lincoln Memorial as a sign of incipient fascism. Less than a year later, 25,000 troops occupying D.C. like Baghdad are being cheered by...