WIRED Roundup: Groypers Are Going Mainstream
Zoë Schiffer: Our colleague, Dell Cameron, reported that according to the results, the 2,000 total files include people who have never been officially accused of crime and around 95 minors. There were also dozens of cases where CBP agents left the charges in white in the documents. In other files analyzed by Georgetown, the police invoked civil sanctions as justification to take the Salive swabs, which were how they obtained DNA samples, that federal law generally reserves criminal arrests.
Jake Lahut: Oh, and this is a recurring theme with Dell’s relationships, but it is difficult to separate a lot from these fundamental things that we have abandoned in terms of personal freedoms, the capacity of the application of laws to collect all kinds of evidence after the war against terrorism. And suddenly, you find yourself in a situation like this one, where we do not know what anyone can really do about it.
Zoë Schiffer: Yes, I think that is the problem, it is that we do not know exactly what they do with this information, because it seems, at least according to this report, to take place outside the limits of the law and there is not much surveillance. And so we just don’t know, and I think that’s the problem. Turning to the White House, President Trump seems to have a new favorite billionaire, and this title comes from your reports. You have written this week on the technological billionaire, the increasingly comfortable relationship of Larry Ellison with President Trump. In your room, one of your sources even refers to Ellison as the president of the Shadow, who really stretched me because I have the impression that it was a term that we generally reserved for Elon Musk. So tell me about how these two men got closer.
Jake Lahut: So, this is the interesting thing about Ellison is that he has been somehow orbit on the outskirts of Trump’s world for some time. He was a truly reliable supporter of the Democrats. Now, in particular, even if he is centillionary, he has always been a little stingy with regard to donations, someone from his caliber. He is not like Elon, pumping $ 300 million in a campaign. But his transformation begins around the Obama era, where the relationship of the former president with Bibi Netanyahu begins to deteriorate. Ellison is a very faithful supporter, not only of Israel and the Israeli government, but in particular of the FDI and the Israeli army, and he begins to become a more reliable donor for the Republicans. So, I have a source who knows the Ellison family who tells me in this story that around 10 years ago, Larry Ellison was going to tell the people he wanted Marco Rubio to be president.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh, wow.
Jake Lahut: In the primary of 2024, he supports Tim Scott, who seemed, OK, you support a rival of that of President Trump, who should make you personalize Non Grata. It turns out that many Trump advisers, and they told me that at the time during the campaign, they thought that Larry Ellison supporting Tim Scott was actually a favor for them, and he promising a lot of money. How many things have really ended up with Super Pac supporting Tim Scott, a separate story. But essentially, Tim Scott was like an insurance policy in the event that the primary was closer and that she was withdrawn and people like Ron Desantis and in particular Nikki Haley would have been there again, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley are from South Carolina. So, in a way, it happens with the rest of the technicians during the summer, and the difference with Ellison is the one, he has some sort of eyes and ears everywhere, that is what I hear from people who know how he works. He does not use donor advisers and an entire entourage to give it the configuration of the land with politics. Instead, he likes to spot his own candidates, and he made first bets on the people who were in the Trump administration. In particular, he was an early donor and collected fundraising for Tulsi Gabbard when she was a democrat. Perhaps in the incident, Larry Ellison holds 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai from other flashy purchases he made. So, at this stage, with the Oracle Server activity, it allows him to fly a little under the radar because servers and software as a service, not really the sexiest company compared to many of these other guys who are around Trump. And then you add his son, David, who heads the mother company of Skydance de Paramount, who could also acquire Warner Brothers, Discovery. This means that the Ellison family would not only control CBS and all these entertainment properties, but also potentially CNN. And suddenly, when you zoom in, you are looking at a family that has started consolidating themselves in the fields of data and human attention of the way a golden age family like the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers would have made for railways and oil. So it was a really fascinating piece to report on how Ellison doesn’t even necessarily need to say things to Trump to make things happen. It’s just so well connected, do you know?
