This investigative report was published by Sinews of War, whose YouTube channel is here and Twitter is here. Please support independent investigative journalism and check out his work.
If you want to support Public Intel, please consider adding yourself to the BuyMeACoffee squad.
Transcription
"What if I told you that a site with no original reporting, and a small staff, manager to outperform the New York Times and the Washington Post on Facebook, despite producing a mere fraction of their content, you might be thinking who are these scrappy underdogs and how did they do it? The underdog in question is Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire, which seems to have become a runaway success with such enthralling articles as "Debunking The Left's Lies About Israel And The Palestinians, The Five Reasons Why I Went From Pro-Choice To Pro-Life, or Woke Academic Gobbledygook Makes You Rich and Famous."
Of course, the real answer is that he cheated using a number of strategies, including entering into an agreement with Mark Zuckerberg himself. Zuckerberg and Shaprio came to an agreement as part of Facebook's wider scheme to favor right-wing content producers that Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and other senior managers chose to succeed. These groups still dominate the top 10 of US Facebook engagement to the point where it's quite comical," Sinews of War said.
"The question that now faces us is why did Facebook do this, and why Shapiro? What exactly was so special about him that Zuckerberg saw fit to dine with him on a number of occasions and whitelist his site so aggressively that he got up to eight times the engagement of the New York Times and the Washington Post?" the reporter asked.
"We can make some educated guesses as to possible motivations and it would make sense that all of them played into the decision. The first motivation that presents itself to us is that Shapiro seems like an obvious Likkud faction influence operation. That Jared Kushner was instrumental in bringing Shapiro and Facebook to come to this agreement, only adds to the evidence pointing at this. Shapiro was in a position as a result of being handed the Facebook megaphone, of being able to shepherd conservative opinions on both Likkud faction interests and Facebook's continuation as a monolithic entity with minimal governmental oversight. Interests here aligned with each other," Sinews of War said.
The journalist cited an article by Charles Johnson called "The Constructs: Is Sheryl Sandberg an Israeli Agent of Influence?"
"The speech from Zuckerberg is quite good; his articulation of free speech principle is actually correct. Now the question is whether Facebook properly carries it out. We should all keep an eagle-eye to ensure Big Tech does," Shapiro said in a tweet.
"The second possible motivation for this relationship is the purely financial one. Shapiro made a lot of money from this deal, and Zuckerberg had significant interest in supporting Trump's re-election so that he could keep hold of Facebook. This is because Zuckerberg and Trump had come to an agreement by which Trump would hold off governmental oversight in exchange for Facebook not fact checking the Trump campaign's statements," the reporter added.
"[Peter] Thiel later told a confidant that Zuckerberg had come to an understanding with [Jared] Kushner during the meal. Facebook, he promised, would avoid fact-checking political speech- thus allowing the Trump campaign to claim whatever it wanted. If it followed through on that promise, the Trump administration would lay off on any heavy-handed regulations," the article said.
Sinews of War cited a Politico article entitled, "Inside Mark Zuckerberg's private meetings with conservative pundits" and an article entitled, "Facebook allows prominent right-wing website to break the rules," by Judd Legum.
it invested in Horizon Capital, run by the son of former premier Wen Jiabao, and it also heavily invested in Hopu Investment Management, which was run by Fang Fenglei, a close friend of Wang Qishan, the Vice President of China and Xi Jinping's closest ally by all accounts. These are not minor people in China, these are people at the very top of Chinese governance. It is scarcely conceivable that a fund with these kinds of relationships would not have deep and profound Chinese intelligence links. It seems like the fund acts as a proxy for Chinese actors. This also goes for RRJ Capital, which is run by the Ong brothers. Richard Ong is very close to Fang Fenglei, just like Temasek was, and frankly, the presence of Fang near any business deal is an indication that th eCommunist party has a close interest. it would seem that this would now also be the same for his daughter, Anna Fang Aizhi, who seems to be continuing the family business by operating as an angel investor in tech in conjunction with Sequoia Capital. Whilst Chinese Communist party interest in a fracking company makes some sense if seen as a play to obtain technology and knowledge for its own potential fracking industry, it seems more than a little coincidental that the investment put a vast amount of money into the hands of the Wilks brothers, who then went to work funding the likes of Ben Shapiro. In fact, if you ignore the various funding vehicles and focus on the people involved, the money trail from the Chinese communist party to Ben Shapiro is a very short chain of financing."
"Lastly, we have the Chinese angle, which is less obvious but can be spied lurking in the background. Zuckerberg clearly has no patriotism for the US. He has courted the Chinese premier on a number of occasions to an embarrassing degree, only to be rebuffed. Might he gone so far as to support political commentators and political actors, such as Trump, that the Chinese were favorable to as part of this sycophancy? This would seem to fit his character. As for Shapiro, prior to Facebook making him wealthy by blasting his smirking face at their users, it was the Wilks brothers, Dan and Farris, that provided the funding that made the Daily Wire possible in the first place. And the source of their wealth was the sale of their fracking business, Frac Tech, which they offloaded to an investment consortium for $3.5 billion in 2011. This sounds all very simple and innocent until you look closer at the consortium that was led by Temasek Holdings and RRJ Capital. Temasek, whilst being nominally Singaporean, seems to spend a great deal of its time investing in Chinese funds run by actors close to the Chinese Communist Party."
"Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementesrock," Shapiro said in a September 2010 post. Shapiro also wrote an article in June 2007 entitled, "The Radical Evil of The Palestinian Arab Population."
"It's not hard to fathom why the Chinese Communist Party would have an interest in supporting the likes of Ben Shapiro and others that the Wilks brothers have funded liberally, given Shapiro routinely promotes things which are patently harmful to American geopolitical and merely seems to serve to rile up large segments of the population against the American government. It's all very well that Shapiro makes noise about the Chinese threat and Chinese wrongdoings, but these statements don't have any effect on China and can help throw people off the trail, whereas his support for the likes of Trump did have an effect and did benefit the Chinese greatly by weakening the US on the geopolitical stage, especially in the Middle East. The idea that the Chinese would inject vast resources into the American political landscape by specifically targeting the Wilks brothers' business for this purchase is not a stretch. It is also not a stretch to speculate that some other kind of agreement was involved in the purchase to sweeten the deal. Consider that the Chinese have made official pronouncements to the effect that controlling the ideological terrain is a national security issue and that it is vital to stop foreign entities using it as a bridgehead to attack China, but this cuts both ways. If the information space in China is seen as a battle ground, then the same applies to the US and other countries and the Chinese would logically be keen to find bridgeheads in these places. The question then raises itself:
Is Ben Shapiro one such bridgehead?"
This intelligence was originally reported by Sinews of War, who can be found on YouTube and Twitter.