SAN BERNARDINO, CA — An attack ad against a Republican candidate reportedly had the opposite effect when it convinced a local man to vote for the Republican.

Most Americans knew the late Scott Adams for Dilbert, his beloved comic strip about an office worker and his dimwitted colleagues. Later in life, Adams became known as a kind of right-wing shock jockey. But the cartoonist caught the FBI's attention for something a little bit different: the sex crimes investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fl.) and a bizarre blackmail scheme that grew out of it.

The FBI released its files on Adams last week, five months after his death, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Reason. The records include the heavily redacted results of a background check and a request to Twitter—the social media network later renamed X—to preserve Adams' account data, including his private messages.

The investigation into Adams seems to have begun in the spring of 2021, when he was entangled in the Gaetz scandal. On March 30, 2021, The New York Times reported that Gaetz was under federal investigation for having sex with an underage teenager. Gaetz claimed that he was actually the victim of blackmail, and the federal investigation focused on the extortionists.

Three days later, The American Conservative published screenshots of a text conversation between Adams and Jake Novak, a former journalist who was then working on the media staff of the Israeli consulate in New York. (The Israeli consulate later told Politico that Novak's involvement in the Gaetz case "was not in any way, shape or form a part of his role at the consulate.")

Novak wrote to Adams that the investigation into Gaetz "is screwing up my efforts to free Bob Levinson," a former FBI agent who disappeared in 2013 while conducting an unauthorized mission for the CIA in Iran. "Gaetz's dad was secretly finding [sic] us. So I'm very much wanting this to be untrue. I've got a commando team leader friend of mine nervously waiting for wire transfers to clear," Novak explained. He claimed that Gaetz's extortion claim "burned" Bob Kent, a private investigator involved in the efforts to free Levinson.

Those efforts were unlikely to succeed. The federal government declared in 2020 that Levinson had died in Iranian captivity.

In a CNN interview, Kent acknowledged that he asked Gaetz's father for money to help rescue Levinson, but denied making any "threats" or "demands." A few months later, Florida businessman Stephen Alford—whom prosecutors called Kent's "associate"—pleaded guilty to making "materially false promises" of a pardon for Gaetz in exchange for funding the Levinson mission. Kent and Novak were not charged with crimes.

Years later, a congressional investigation concluded that Gaetz had indeed paid a 17-year-old girl for sex, though the federal government declined to prosecute him.

Adams never quite gave a satisfying explanation for why he was involved in the case. "Jake [Novak] and I shared an interest in the mechanics of persuasion, and in interesting business/political stories in general. Most often the stuff with a persuasion or Israel angle. That was our initial connection…people often tell me their scoops before they hit the news just to build credibility. Might have been that," he told Politico.

The FBI files do little to shed light on that mystery, but they do put some of Adams' old comments in a new light. "Do you think they looked at my personal data because I ever had a conversation with somebody from another country? Probably. And I can't find that out, can I? If I sued the government, could I find out if they looked at my data? I could FOIA the FBI," he said in a 2022 livestream. It turns out that the answer to these questions was yes.

The post Why did the FBI Want <i>Dilbert</i> Creator Scott Adams' Twitter Data? appeared first on Reason.com.

In the last installment of this series, I wrote about the weird philosophical idea which helped guarantee that a Marxist ideology centered around the “working class” of industrial factory-floor wrench-turners would end up being run by a clique of middle-class intellectual misfits who appointed themselves to administer The Revolution on behalf of the proletariat.

But the joke was on these intellectuals, because they didn’t really get the power. They were, in fact, the next to be crushed in their own machine.

Subscribe now

In Main Currents of Marxism, Leszek Kołakowski describes the pattern.

After the resistance of all social classes—proletariat, peasantry, and intelligentsia—had been overcome, after all forms of social life not ordained by the state had been crushed out of existence, and the opposition within the party had been destroyed, it was time to subdue the last element that might—though it did not in practice—threaten the completeness of totalitarian rule under a single despot: namely the party itself, the instrument which had been used to stifle and destroy every other rival force in the community. The destruction of the party was achieved during the years 1935-9, and established a new record in the conflict between the Soviet regime and its own subjects.

The idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was supposed to mean that the proletariat as a whole would just dictate production, directly, somehow. But of course there is no “somehow” for doing this, so a putatively representative institution, the party, had to be built up and given that dictatorial power. But there could be internal divisions within the party, disagreements about how to proceed, and it was easy to portray one side or the other of those disagreements as an attempt to thwart the rule of the proletariat and serve as a vehicle for bourgeois reactionary forces—all the more so since any sensible response to communist economic policies is probably going to looks more like capitalism.

Kolakowski describes the process by which dissent within the party and the jostling of opposing party “fractions” was suppressed. But what this implies, if the party is going to follow only one policy with no debate or dissent, is that ultimately one person is going to be dictating everything. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” inevitably becomes just the dictatorship of one guy.

Hence the internal purge of the party to ensure loyalty to that one man above all—including above Marxism itself.

The passage above is from the beginning of Kołakowski’s chapter on Stalin’s Great Purge, and he provides the most interesting and convincing perspective on the purge that I have ever read.

Read more

Bill Maher settled on a curious recurring joke during his interview with Spencer Pratt.

The future Mark Twain Prize winner told Pratt to stop making the L.A. mayor’s race so darn “personal.”

Sure, your house burned to a crisp thanks in part to government incompetence, but isn’t it time we look past that nagging issue?

Maher’s gag fell flat the first time he tried it, while Pratt took it with surprising grace. The host trotted it out a few more times during their hour-plus conversation.

By the end, it seemed obvious that Maher was on Team Pratt. He just couldn’t say it out loud.

He didn’t have to.

The curious exchange found Maher gently pressing Pratt on several key issues, from the city’s current, dysfunctional state to the future of solar panels in the Golden State.

The latter was a rare swing-and-miss for Pratt, but he quickly recovered to say that renewable energy isn’t atop his “to do” list.

Nor should it be given L.A.’s sizable flaws.

RELATED: BILL MAHER DID WHAT NO OTHER LATE NIGHT COMIC DARED

RELATED: BILL MAHER HEART HAMAS, NOT THE USA

Maher remains a loyal Democratic voter, but he suggested he may not pull the lever for either Mayor Karen Bass or far-Left candidate Nithya Raman.

How?

“You had me at hello,” Maher told Pratt at the end of their conversation. Yes, Maher is liberal and he adores his adopted city of Los Angeles.

He also knows societal decay when he sees it.

“I didn’t know until I talked to you … but you have the exact right impatience with this s***. It’s very authentic,” Maher said.

It’s one thing for Pratt to drop by Fox News’ “Gutfeld!” The right-leaning candidate did just that a few days ago, a venue that let him share his talking points with little blowback.

Visiting with a man renowned for his liberal politics is something else.

The fact that Pratt either won Maher over or the comedian was sold on Pratt’s campaign long before he entered the podcast studio speaks volumes. At times, Maher played the political advisor, suggesting where Pratt should tone down his pitch and where to double down on it.

He’s clearly rooting for him to shake up the status quo, if not win the whole shebang.

It’s also noteworthy that Maher would “platform” Pratt in the first place. The host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” recently savaged Pratt from his ABC pulpit, a blend of partisanship and personal attacks. 

Wouldn’t it be easier to invite Pratt onto the ABC show and settle things in person? Kimmel would never do such a thing. His audience would revolt.

More importantly, he might get his clock cleaned by Pratt, rhetorically speaking.

Maher understands having Pratt on the air is more than just a great talk show “get.” It’s a way to save Los Angeles from its disastrous status quo.

The post Did Bill Maher Just Win L.A. Mayor’s Race for Spencer Pratt? appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.