— “Boston City Council wants the city to prioritize turning old school, municipal buildings into affordable housing,” by Niki Griswold, The Boston Globe: “At a hearing Monday, officials from Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration updated the City Council on the city’s efforts to convert old school and municipal buildings into affordable housing. The city has several projects underway to reimagine municipally owned properties and presented several successful examples of old school buildings redeveloped into housing. Despite the progress, city leaders acknowledged the process is time-consuming and faces financial constraints.” MUST READ! — “A website that provides a platform for neo-Nazis got its seed funding from Boston elites,” by Tim Biba and Phillip Martin, GBH News. excerpts: Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report identifying 165 “extremist channels” that publicly shared more than 50,000 videos on the Odysee website between 2021 and 2023. The report found 113 of the channels earned “tip”-style donations during that period, amounting to $336,000. Megan Squire, co-author of the report and the center’s deputy director for data analytics, told GBH News that platforms that market themselves as having “free speech” or “uncensorable” features almost always cater to far-right extremists. Odysee stands out because it’s one of a few alt-tech sites similar to YouTube, she said. “They want a place that’s not going to tell them they’re not allowed to say hateful, terroristic, illegal things,’’ she said. “Odysee plays that role and that’s a problem.” Signs of how the website has been embraced by extremists are numerous. LBRY Vice President Julian Chandra, now Odysee’s CEO, once defended the presence of neo-Nazis on the site, an incident first reported by the Guardian in 2021. Early support from Boston investorsPillar VC is a Boston-based venture capital firm created in 2016 by a group of investors, led by local entrepreneur Jamie Goldstein, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School, according to his LinkedIn page. Among Pillar’s cofounders are some of Boston’s most successful business leaders: Steve Kaufer, the cofounder of TripAdvisor; Gail Goodman, the founding CEO of the database site Constant Contact; and Chad Laurans, cofounder of the home security company SimpliSafe. None of these co-founders could be reached for comment through their companies. It’s unclear if Pillar VC has any connection with Odysee at this time. But a review of court records and interviews by the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting show how Pillar leaders worked with Odysee founders to create what now appears to be a thriving website for the alt-right. CRYPTO SCAM! One of the venture capital firm’s first investments was $300,000 provided to the cryptocurrency business LBRY, Odysee’s parent company, according to a company audit submitted as an exhibit in a federal court case later filed against LBRY. In 2016, LBRY posted a press release announcing that Pillar — with that money — was leading a $500,000 fundraising round that helped build the infrastructure that led to Odysee. “Pillar VC is operated by determined visionaries who conducted careful due diligence in funding LBRY,” the press release said. LBRY was created by New Hampshire–based entrepreneur and Libertarian politician Jeremy Kauffman on July 4, 2016. GBH News could not reach Odysee’s current leadership for comment on this story. Kauffman responded with a one-line email comment last week. “Every so-called journalist at GBH Boston is as evil as a reporter for Pravda, and a proper society would deport, jail, or execute them,” he wrote. Kauffman has been criticized for now deleted tweets about murdering trans people. He is also a leader of the Mises Caucus, a national group of Libertarians who the Southern Poverty Law Center says are colluding with far-right leaders to gain political power nationwide. “High-profile MC members espouse hateful rhetoric and collaborate with white nationalists,’’ the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote in a 2022 blog post. Kauffman most recently made headlines after being connected to a New Hampshire Libertarian Party online post, saying, “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.” Kauffman posted a video on X showing how he berated federal authorities who came to his house to ask about the post, while claiming nothing unlawful had occurred.
More details arise in federal courtSecurities and Exchange Commission lawyers filed a case against LBRY in 2021, arguing that cryptocurrency traded on LBRY should have been registered with the federal government. In a deposition for the SEC case, Pillar founder Goldstein said he and Pillar Managing Partner Sarah Hodges spent significant time personally working on LBRY. “Sarah and I spent a lot of time with the company in that first year,” Goldstein said in the 2022 deposition. “At one point, we went to Jeremy and said, ‘We are spending a tremendous amount of our time here. It’s the most valuable thing we have. We only own 6% of your company. That doesn’t feel like enough to us. We would like to own more. We’d like more upside.’” He told federal interviewers that he eventually accepted cryptocurrency traded on the site as added remuneration. Neither Goldstein nor Hodges returned GBH News’ emails seeking comment. It’s unclear if the companies are still connected. But some say Pillar and its founders should have known about Kauffman’s plan to market Odysee as an alt-tech site or, at the very least, seen evidence of what it has become. One document entered as evidence in the federal court case shows Kauffman’s talking points for his pitch to investors. It includes several references to wanting to build an uncensorable website that does not have content moderation, and claims that YouTube has too much say in what people can post online. In his business plan for LBRY, Kauffman said he would “leave the creators and users in charge, not us.” He said the company’s growth plan includes finding a way to recruit users from YouTube, progressing “from niche or otherwise outside the mainstream content’’ to more mainstream. If his company were successful, Kauffman wrote, it would be “worth rather absurd sums of money.”
— “Councilor Flynn continues push for state intervention in BPS bus issues, says city leaders ‘continue to downplay it’,” by Grace Zokovitch, Boston Herald: “City Councilor Ed Flynn continued to argue for state intervention to assist with the BPS late buses issue Monday, pushing back a day after the Boston City Council president called such a move ‘definitely premature.’ … The debate comes in response to a higher-than-normal rate of late BPS buses in the first three weeks of school, attributed by officials to the new GPS technology through the Zum app and an unprecedented number of late enrollments and route changes.”
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