Recovering political consultant, columnist, cynic. https://nitter.cf/t.co/MstH6KFB0P https://nitter.cf/t.co/HpkcRB6SUv
Hiding in the World
Joined August 2011
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During the Vietnam War, the Army used listening devices in the jungle to watch for enemy troops. But, at least once, an over-sensitive radio operator who hadn’t been in the country long called an air strike on a small, bright… intheswamp.wordpress.com/202…
Thomas A Brown retweeted
Stanford University student Elsa Johnson became a target of the Chinese Communist Party in 2024.
Elsa attended a private school as a child with a heavy focus on foreign languages and became fluent in Mandarin Chinese while still in elementary school. Years later after she was accepted to Stanford, she studied international relations and researched Chinese industry and military tactics while working at the Hoover Institution on campus.
She soon came to the attention of members of the Chinese Communist Party, which has a heavy presence at Stanford and throughout Southern California. There are currently more than 1,000 Chinese students attending Stanford each year, and the university has received more than $64,000,000 in private donations from Chinese individuals and organizations since 2010.
In June 2024, a man claiming to be a fellow Stanford student named Charles Chen contacted her online. She was not initially suspicious as they had many mutual associates, and his photos and posts appeared to be centered on campus. But his questions and requests quickly put her on edge as he invited her on a paid trip to China. And he seemingly knew details about her that she had never shared with him.
When she tried to disengage with him, she began receiving threatening phone calls by Chinese speakers. Elsa contacted Stanford administrators and the FBI, who told her Charles was likely affiliated with the Ministry of State Security, had been posing as a Stanford student for years, and had targeted at least ten other female students since 2020 in a similar manner. They also told her she was under physical surveillance on campus by the Chinese Communist Party.
Elsa wrote articles in the Stanford Review and The Free Press about Chinese influence on campus, and in March 2026 testified about espionage threats on college campuses before the House Committee on Education and Workforce.
For episode 270 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I spoke with Elsa about being targeted by a foreign government right in the middle of a US college campus. The episode is available now.
#stanford #college #student #china #hooverinstitute
open.spotify.com/episode/6KO…
Thomas A Brown retweeted
How Wikipedia Rewrote Zionism
Since October 2023, four-fifths of the encyclopedia’s article on Zionism has been replaced. And work of editors who have been banned from the page remains.
quillette.com/2026/10/30/how…
Thomas A Brown retweeted
So last week I released a book about how Russia manufactured and leveraged a lie about Jeffrey Epstein to wage information warfare against America, Israel and Jews. And just yesterday, Aleksandr Dugin released this book—confirming exactly what I argued they were doing.
I really didn’t think I’d be proven correct so fast. But here we are.
Thomas A Brown retweeted
In southwestern Idaho, there’s a county called Owyhee.
Odd-sounding name. It originates from three Hawaiian fur trappers who never returned from a remote part of the county.
Say “Owyhee” aloud. You’re already halfway to solving the mystery.
1/n
Thomas A Brown retweeted
The coward @CllrSimonB has closed his X account.
Don’t call his office (07973 665277), nor email him ([email protected]) to say how much you despise this POS.
Oh, btw. His civic correspondence address is c/o Civic Centre, St. Peter’s Square, Wolverhampton, WV1 1RG.
Have fun.
Thomas A Brown retweeted
HBO's @LastWeekTonight has a long track record of citing social science findings without the appropriate context, massaging them to support whatever point @iamjohnoliver is trying to make.
Thomas A Brown retweeted
Denmark spent decades building nearly 5,000 wind turbines
Together, they produced 21.6 TWh in the last 12 months
One nuclear plant in Sweden made 23.3 TWh
Oh, and nuclear runs 24/7 — wind doesn’t
There's one big reason Denmark has some of the most expensive electricity in the world
transparency.entsoe.eu/gener…
api.energidataservice.dk/dat…
eia.gov/electricity/monthly/…
iaea.org/publications/16059
Thomas A Brown retweeted
One of my least favorite traits in liberals is the tendency to assign to bigotry claims made against members of minority populations that, when made against non-minorities, would be obviously in-bounds.
This has happened twice to me recently, re: Abdul el-Sayed and Ilhan Omar.
Abdul el-Sayed's birth mother was a Muslim Brotherhood activist. His half-sister posted publicly about being ardent supporter. He denied the existence of family ties rather than addressing them when asked. He signed a petition in support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The question of his support for the Muslim Brotherhood is not because he is Muslim; the story has legs because he has close family ties and lied about them.
Ilhan Omar married one man in a religious ceremony, then married another civilly, claimed to separate after two years, then divorced after and remarried her first husband civilly. During her marriage to her second husband, she filed taxes jointly with her first. The circumstances of her second marriage are very obviously suspicious. People have investigated whether he was her brother and whether the marriage was for immigration reasons. The core of the allegation is not incest, but immigration fraud, and it has legs specifically because the circumstances look very very weird.
I absolutely and categorically refuse to turn my brain off when I see things I would flag as weird in any other context simply because the context is that Republicans are using those things in partisan ways against Democratic politicians from minority backgrounds. That leads to a toxic dynamic, a sort of incuriosity-of-low-expectations, where the only anomalies people are "allowed" to take seriously are ones that do not possibly implicate identity traits.
No. It is reasonable to ask Abdul el-Sayed about the Muslim Brotherhood; it is reasonable to scrutinize Ilhan Omar's second marriage. I will hold this line and I will not apologize for it or hedge when people choose to selectively see scrutiny as bigotry.
Thomas A Brown retweeted
Characteristics of *actual* banned books:
- Amazon refuses to sell bc it violates their “offensive content policy”
- online forums discussing it are filled with ‘we need to do something’ anons (FBI)
- people will fly around the world to murder you for translating it
Thomas A Brown retweeted
like i’m not glazing my country or ignoring what we’ve done but if we wanna play that game im putting every country on blast
Thomas A Brown retweeted
The tiny Mediterranean island of Malta has a population of over half a million, despite being only 28 kms (17 mi) long and 14.5 kms (9 mi) wide.
However, Malta has no permanent rivers or natural lakes. How, then, do over 500,000 people access fresh water?
1/n
Thomas A Brown retweeted
“According to an influential 2015 study, teachers respond more harshly when a misbehaving student is Black rather than White. But four attempted replications failed to find any such effect.”
stevestewartwilliams.com/p/f…
Thomas A Brown retweeted
JUST IN: NASA says its Moon Base is running ahead of schedule, with the first element now expected to launch in December followed by near-monthly robotic missions to the lunar surface beginning in early 2027.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency expects to beat the original national-space-policy target of putting the first Moon Base elements in place by 2030.
The plan is to send infrastructure, rovers and other equipment ahead of astronauts so hardware is already operating on the surface when crews arrive.
NASA is also developing a public website that will allow people to follow construction of the lunar base as missions arrive.
“We’re leaving no doubts this time,” Isaacman said. “It’s all in HD.”
