Warren Buffett cut off Peter Flaherty's mic. Here's a possible reason why.

Flaherty was escorted out of the Berkshire Hathaway meeting, then arrested, fingerprinted, and jailed for exercising his shareholder rights. But who was really out of line?

I witnessed something very revealing near the end of Saturday's otherwise inspiring Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting at Omaha’s CHI Health Center that deserves deeper exploration by America’s disturbingly incurious media. During this final period, select Berkshire shareholders typically opine on resolutions that have already been voted upon in advance by hundreds of thousands of fellow shareholders. In every case, every year, the resolutions—originally just on global warming but now expanding to unconstitutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) mandates—are voted down, with most shareholders invariably aligning with whatever Buffett wants even if they personally align with a resolution. The speeches at the meeting are a mere, if entertaining, formality.

This past Saturday, a riveting presentation appeared for a change from the populist Right, demanding that an independent person chair the Berkshire board due to Buffett's sizable and potentially brand-damaging donations to the controversial Gates Foundation. Though putatively entitled The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, over half of the Gates Foundation's roughly $60 billion war chest originates from Buffett. Though the “Oracle of Omaha” claims that his personal philanthropy is not in the name of Berkshire, in the public mind that is a distinction without a difference since the man and his conglomerate are perceptually intertwined. So, it is a matter of fiduciary interest how the Buffett/Gates money is dispensed.

Berkshire shareholder Peter Flaherty was concerned enough that he courageously raised the issue during the final hour. But halfway into his three-minute jeremiad, Flaherty's mic was shut off. See the full video and photos here. You weirdly cannot easily find the incident on YouTube.

Buffett claimed that Flaherty––whom I do not know but whom I randomly witnessed practicing his speech across the hall from me at our hotel Saturday morning––had crossed a line when he mentioned that Gates regularly met with the late Jeffrey Epstein even after Epstein was found guilty of sex with minors. Melinda Gates cited Bill Gates' regular meetings with Epstein as a key factor in her filing for divorce.

I am not keen on guilt-by-association claims, though Gates later admitted that he made a mistake in huddling with Epstein after the sex offender’s guilt was clearly established. But that was not the most disturbing nor relevant aspect of Flaherty's spiel, into which he was sidewinding when Buffett cut him off. Flaherty was then escorted out of the arena, arrested, fingerprinted, and jailed, at the request of the publicly financed and managed CHI Health Center staff. Those constitutional issues will no doubt come into play at Mr. Flaherty’s hearing date, set for May 22 back in Omaha.

Perhaps what Mr. Buffett did not want the public to learn from firebrand Flaherty was that the Gates Foundation donates significant sums to dark money fixer, Arabella Associates, which successfully occludes the names of its billionaire donors to far-left causes that most Americans do not support. Those causes include defunding the police, critical race indoctrination in schools, preteen genital mutilation (nee “gender-affirming care”), attacks on Supreme Court Justices, thwarting climate change “wrong-think,” and, of course, anything and everything that destroys Trump. Those billionaires include the Gates Foundation (by far Arabella’s largest client), George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg, who deployed Arabella to mask his political activism as “philanthropy” in the 2020 cycle with his over $350 million in “Zuck Bucks” to local election officials.

Arabella is not afraid to go full Corleone. It used its enormous leverage to force TV stations to take down ads critical of Kentanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation fight. Arabella's present “pop-up” initiative is to seed propaganda and disinformation into the public sphere to protect Hunter Biden, who is under Congressional and perhaps FBI investigation for criminal influence-peddling while his father Joe was Vice President.

Several high-level Democratic politicos have confirmed to me that the key reason for their party’s surprising success in the 2022 midterms was not the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on abortion but outsized levels of dark money, putting the Democratic campaign war chest at two to three times that of the Republican Party. Unlikely bedfellows from The Atlantic to Fox News to Influence Watch all confirmed that this is a disturbing trend for a party that routinely calls for donor transparency, outs major Republican donors, and is generally at war with the billionaire class (see the regular anti-billionaire jabs from Democrats Sanders, Warren, and Ocasio-Cortez). It is also a disturbing trend for Mr. Buffett, who rightly sings the praises and promise of America to a rapt investing world, but is funding, wittingly or not, the very initiatives that are undermining its founding principles.

Flaherty may have been slightly out of order in his tone, but was he out of line in his message? Let me know in the comments area below.