Sunday News: DeSantis gets caught stealing; Palantir aids terrorism; two mass shootings generate disparate coverage

This Sunday news round-up is free to read. Check out the rest of my work and subscribe to support my efforts in holding people accountable, covering the stories mainstream media ignores or misconstrues, and bringing you all the data that matters.

---

DeSantis stole funding for child and medical services for advertising against marijuana and and abortion ballot initiatives.

An explosive investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald into DeSantis’ theft of public funds last year revealed he stole tens of millions of dollars from child protection programs and Medicaid, among other programs.

The money he stole went to marketing and advertising against two ballot amendments he didn’t like - both of which received more than 50% of support by voters, but fell just short of the 60% needed in order to become law.

By the report’s count, more than $36 million was stolen in public funds to go toward propaganda against 2024 ballot measures to legalize marijuana and overturn DeSantis’ six-week abortion ban.

From the report:

The Department of Children and Families, which has struggled for decades to protect kids in foster care, devoted $1.1 million from its child protection program to place ads. The money came from federal grants that mostly went to organizations that help kids in foster care or offer services and counseling to parents so that they don’t lose custody of their children.

The DeSantis administration took another $4 million from the state’s opioid settlement trust fund and directed it toward the campaigns. State lawmakers last year assigned $18 million from the trust fund for “prevention and media campaigns” but stated they “must target communities that are disproportionately impacted by opioid or other substance misuse.”

DeSantis’ previous theft of $10 million in Medicaid funds diverted to his wife’s “Hope Florida” slush fund is currently part of an ongoing grand jury investigation. That money went to a political committee run by DeSantis’ Chief of Staff during his brief and humiliating 2024 campaign for President.

---

American tech company Palantir aided foreign terrorist attack

American tech company Palantir helped plan and carry out two separate terrorist attacks against an American-allied nation last year, according to Alex Karp, co-founder of the company.

The first attack involved setting off explosives indiscriminately across Lebanon’s capital city, killing 12 people and injuring 3,000 more. At a funeral for the victims of the first attack, Israel set off more explosives, killing another 20 people and injuring 450 more.

Combined, the attacks injured and maimed nearly 4,000 people. Two children were killed. The attack was condemned by the UN as a war crime.

After initially denying responsibility, Israel later admitted to committing both terrorist attacks against Lebanon. Israel and the United States have painted the attack as a “pre-counterattack” against Lebanon’s second-largest political party, Hezbollah, but neither provided evidence showing plans of an attack.

The attack by Israel was, in part, a plot to kill elected officials in the party, which holds 15 seats in Lebanon’s parliament (second only to the Lebanese Forces, which hold 19 seats). One elected official’s daughter was killed in the attack.

Israel’s use of technology to carry out political assassinations and mass murder has been an issue of major controversy since Israeli whistleblowers first came forward about the LavenderAI program.

Palantir’s role was only recently revealed by the co-founder of his company in his upcoming memoir.

Palantir currently gets 55% of its funding from US government contracts.

They have $10 billion in contracts with the US Army.

In a civilized society, the people who run a company that commits acts of terrorism on behalf of a foreign country against another foreign country would be in prison. In America, the co-founder of said company brags about it in his book.

---

Shootings at Brown University and Bondi Beach, Australia become a lesson in media punditry bias

Two (or possibly three) gunman opened fire at Bondi Beach in Australia yesterday, killing 11 people and injuring 29 more, including two police officers who confronted and killed one of the gunmen.

Bondi Beach in Australia receives an average of 40,000 visitors per day in December, its busiest time of the year. As the peak of Australia’s summer season, the half-mile crescent stretch of beach becomes crammed with locals and tourists throughout the day.

The shooting is the first major attack by a gunman in Australia in nearly 30 years.

While no details about the shooters have been released, that hasn’t stopped self-styled “centrists” from connecting the shooting to one of the multiple events being hosted on the packed beach that day.

Chris Cuomo, who I once considered a close friend, immediately began attacking Islam as the cause of the attack, because one of the events hosted at the beach yesterday marked the beginning of Hanukkah, a Jewish holiday. Police reported that about 2.5% of the days’ visitors were at Bondi Beach for the Hanukkah event.

While the news continues to unfold and the shooting may very likely be a targeted attack against Australia’s Jewish community, at the time of the onslaught of “Islam is dangerous” rhetoric, there was no evidence to support that. And evidence matters.

Evidence of such claims should be firm before demonizing entire groups of people, especially as hate crimes against Muslims in the West have been increasing at an alarming pace. False allegations not only harm those involved, but harm entire communities, as well.

A few examples:

A Harvard professor who was killing rats in his back yard with a BB gun was attacked by private security guards, suspended from the university, and deported last week on false allegations of antisemitism.

Because the events happened the day before Yom Kippur and the professor lived on the same street as a synagogue, both the White House and media pundits falsely accused him of “firing a gun at a synagogue during a Jewish holiday.”

The head of Chabad House at Harvard released a statement saying antisemitism was not a factor, defending the professor and his family (who are Jewish). The police released a statement saying antisemitism wasn’t a factor. The synagogue itself said antisemitism wasn’t a factor.

But he was arrested and deported anyway, his family’s lives turned completely upside down.

And that’s hardly the only story the news has run with often times in spite of overwhelming evidence that antisemitism had nothing to do with an incident.

Just yesterday, the AP ran a story about a man who pled guilty to firing a gun outside of a Jewish school, invoking fears of antisemitism in social media posts (no one was injured).

But the man who fired the gun is Jewish — a former student at the school near where the incident occurred. And what led to the incident was a dispute with a construction contractor and possible mental breakdown of the shooter. Incidentally, the man who fired the gun will not serve any time in prison.

And the AP’s claim that the shooting “took place as fears increased of anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States” is a complete fabrication.

The shooting happened July 31, 2023 — more than two months before the Oct. 7 attacks in Palestine which have been attributed to the rise in reported and perceived fears.

Then there were shootings at the University of Las Vegas and Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Texas that were both falsely attributed to the movement against genocide in Gaza.

And let’s not forget the car crash at Rainbow Bridge in November 2023, which Zionists, MAGA and “centrists” alike immediately blamed on Islamic extremism and called a “terrorist attack” — causing a shutdown of all border crossings at Niagara Falls and triggering security alerts nationwide during one of the busiest travel weeks of the year.

There were even false reports that an Iranian passport was found at the scene.

In reality, a wealthy American couple from New York hit a median while driving at high speeds, launching their Bentley Flying Spur into the air, which then crashed near the Niagara Falls border crossing.

The allegations of Islamic terrorism at Rainbow Bridge went international, and anti-Muslim bigotry that had been simmering in Ireland boiled over in a series of domestic terrorist attacks led by white nationalists in what was described as the worst riots in Ireland in decades.

And while each of these events were falsely tied to antisemitism, real attacks targeting Muslim Americans received a fraction of the airtime — including the brutal murder of a six-year-old boy in Chicago and the shooting of three college students of Palestinian descent in Burlington, VT.

But getting back to the current virality of belligerence toward Islam and Muslims:

Chris’ bigotry in blaming all of Islam for the attack at Bondi Beach was immediately undercut by the hero of the day — a 43-year-old fruit stand owner named Ahmed al-Ahmed, who is Muslim.

Video circulating online shows Ahmed sneaking up behind one of the shooters. Ahmed was unarmed, but he tackled the shooter, took his gun, and stopped the shooting. Al-Ahmed was shot twice in the struggle and is still hospitalized.

Contrast this coverage and tone with the shooting yesterday at Brown University here in the United States, with today being the anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, which claimed the lives of 20 children and six staff members.

The only information we have about the Brown shooter is that he’s a white male in his 20’s. Still, that’s more information than we have about the shooters at Bondi beach.

In the Untied States, the odds of a white male shooter in his 20’s being Christian or aligned with the far-right are high — almost 90% high.

Yet, neither Chris nor any of the other pundits are rushing to condemn Christianity or conservatism as inherently dangerous to Western culture.

In fact, Christianity is almost never condemned for being a violent, extremist religion despite it being the dominant religion among domestic terrorists and mass shooters alike.

Neither is Judaism condemned as being violent when Jewish extremists carry out terrorist attacks or try to ethnically cleanse an entire country.

Even though Israel carries out international acts of terror in the name of Judaism, there is no national-level rhetoric about preventing Jewish people from immigrating to the US the way there is with Muslims.

No sitting Congressman are sharing photos of Jews praying and calling them “barbarians.”

They are not labeled invaders, savages, or dangerous.

There are nearly as many practitioners of Islam as there are of Christianity in the world. In fact, one in four people on this planet identify as being Muslim.

I’m an atheist and believe all religion is equally dangerous when weaponized to punish “others" or to justify murder, war, and terrorism. But the Abrahamic faiths — all birthed from the same region with overlapping same stories and characters — seem to pull disparate condemnation in this country.

And the media is not only tolerating it — they’re causing it.