Hello and welcome to Tuesday, June 30. It was always going to be Tuesday. There's nothing to be done about it.
My magic calendar says it's Social Media Day, International Asteroid Day, National Meteor Watch Day, and National Corvette Day. So post something, look up, brace for impact, and maybe go look at a Corvette. In that order, ideally.
1859: Charles Blondin becomes the first person to cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope — 160 feet above the gorge, in pink tights, watched by 5,000 people. He does it roughly 300 more times. At one point, he cooks an omelet halfway across.
1905: Albert Einstein, age 26 and working as a patent clerk, submits a paper introducing special relativity. The journal publishes it. The world has not quite recovered.
1908: Something explodes above the Tunguska River in Siberia, flattening 800 square miles of forest. No crater is ever found. The leading theory is that an asteroid detonated before impact. It remains the largest such event in recorded history, which is why International Asteroid Day falls on this date.
1934: Hitler orders the Night of the Long Knives — a purge of the SA leadership and hundreds of political rivals, carried out by the SS over a single weekend. The lesson: loyalty to Hitler was the only loyalty that counted.
1953: The first Chevrolet Corvette rolls off the line in Flint, Mich. White exterior, red interior, 300 made that year. An American icon, more or less by accident.
1966: The National Organization for Women is founded and would become the largest feminist organization in American history. The debate over whether it has finished its work continues.
1971: The crew of Soyuz 11 dies during reentry when a faulty valve vents their air supply. They are the only humans to have died in space. They had just completed the first successful docking with a space station.
1985: Thirty-nine American hostages are freed in Beirut after 17 days of captivity following the hijacking of TWA Flight 847.
1990: East and West Germany merge their economies. Political reunification follows in October. Forty-five years divided and then not.
2013: Nineteen firefighters are killed battling a wildfire near Yarnell, Ariz., after a sudden wind shift trapped them.
Birthdays today include: Lena Horne, singer, actress, and civil rights activist; Robert Ballard, oceanographer who found the Titanic, the Bismarck, and JFK's PT-109; David Alan Grier, comedian and actor best known for In Living Color; Vincent D'Onofrio, actor best known for Full Metal Jacket and Law & Order: Criminal Intent; Mike Tyson, boxer, former undisputed heavyweight champion, and the youngest man ever to hold the WBC, WBA, and IBF titles simultaneously; Michael Phelps, swimmer, 28 Olympic medals, the most decorated Olympian in history; and Shawn Mendes, Canadian singer-songwriter and solo act who rose to fame on social media before scoring hits including "Stitches" and "Treat You Better."
If today's your day as well, hope it's a great one.
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In my notes yesterday on 'No Kings' and the DSA, I wrote:
Fox News Digital identified key participation by a network of radical socialist and communist organizations that Neville Roy Singham — a Marxist tech billionaire — funds through groups including the People's Forum, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the ANSWER Coalition, CodePink, and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. I've written about him previously. I've long suspected his money comes directly from the Chinese Communists.
That would now seem to be confirmed. Yesterday morning, while I was putting the finishing touches on that piece, Asra Q. Nomani went to press with an impressive bit of actual reporting on the subject of Singham:
A federal grand jury is investigating alleged financial crimes by Neville Roy Singham, the China-based tech tycoon whose fortune has funded a sprawling network of socialist, communist and Marxist organizations across the U.S. over the last decade.
According to sources familiar with the matter, the grand jury in Manhattan has issued subpoenas as part of a probe launched by U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York, one of the country's most powerful districts for federal prosecutions. Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche authorized the investigation as the Trump administration seeks to crack down on fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes in the multibillion-dollar nonprofit industry.
The grand jury action follows a Fox News Digital investigation published in mid-March, documenting how Singham pumped $285 million from his base in Shanghai into a Goldman Sachs philanthropy fund and two shell corporations that then fed the money into a constellation of nonprofit organizations, media operations and activist groups pushing sectarian division, identity politics and support for socialist politicians.
The investigation is examining the movement of the money in Singham's financial network and attempting to determine if Singham, the organizations he funded or their leaders committed wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering or other financial crimes, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Fox appears to be taking the lead on this aspect of the story. (Yeah, it does seem unlikely the legacy media would touch the story, doesn’t it?) It's interesting that the Southern District of New York is taking these actions. I'll be interested to see if they actually take any action against Singham. Treasury is getting into the act, too, so perhaps they will.
A Treasury Department spokesman declined to comment. A person familiar with the meeting confirmed that it occurred, saying that Bessent has regular meetings with business leaders, and declined to comment further on the substance of the meeting.
At that meeting, sources said, Bessent delivered a blunt ultimatum: Goldman Sachs could face scrutiny for alleged conspiracy in funneling the Singham money, and he urged Solomon to cooperate with federal investigators.
Another source familiar with the meeting said that it wasn't contentious and that Solomon readily agreed to pledge his cooperation with the Justice Department investigation.
I can well believe that. Solomon doubtless recognizes the depth of the stink coming off these deals, and a man who runs Goldman Sachs didn't get there by being slow on the uptake. All it took was the guy running the treasury to show up, asking questions, to wake him up.
What jumps out to me here is how far this has already traveled in such a short window — and I get the distinct impression that Solomon was caught flat-footed too. We're not talking about a House committee firing off a strongly worded letter, or some op-ed (such as this one) clutching its pearls and demanding scrutiny.
We're talking about a sitting Treasury Secretary personally leaning on the CEO of Goldman Sachs, and a U.S. Attorney's office that doesn't swing unless it expects to connect. The SDNY, fresh off its embarrassing track record going after President Donald Trump, isn't exactly eager for another round of public faceplanting. These people have learned, however belatedly, that grandstanding has a cost. So when they open a grand jury and start issuing subpoenas out of Manhattan, it's a safe bet they're not doing it for the headline — they think they've already got a paper trail worth dragging into daylight.
The Goldman Sachs angle is the one worth watching like a hawk. A philanthropy fund at a bank of that size has no business serving as a laundromat for $285 million flowing out of Shanghai and into a network of card-carrying Marxist activist groups. If Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's talk of "conspiracy" exposure is more than theater, as I suspect and suppose it is, it means Treasury suspects Goldman's compliance department either fell asleep at the wheel or deliberately looked away while the money sailed through. And Solomon's reported eagerness to "cooperate" the instant Bessent leaned on him isn't the behavior of a man with a clean conscience — banks don't roll over that fast unless they smell the noose tightening.
Then there's the Shanghai detail, which is the part that should make people sit up straight. Singham running his fortune out of Communist China while bankrolling American groups that organize street protests, stoke sectarian division, and prop up socialist candidates is about as textbook a foreign-influence operation as you're likely to find outside a spy novel. Whether prosecutors actually go there — invoking FARA and the rest of the statutes built for exactly this scenario — remains to be seen. But the financial-crimes framing of wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering has a habit of being the opening act, with the real fireworks (foreign influence, foreign control) showing up once the financial trail forces the issue. It's hard to see this going anywhere else.
The other question is the people in our government under Joe Biden, who made no move against any of this. Either asleep at the switch or actively encouraging these antics. Knowing what we know about their political leanings, the latter seems more likely.
I've already stocked the cupboard with popcorn. This one's going to be worth watching.
Thought for the day: “I’m allergic to stupidity. I break out in sarcasm.”
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