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1
Politics & Religion / Chinese Company that Ensnared the Bidens
« on: February 18, 2025, 03:15:35 PM »
Chinese front company that ensnared the Bidens and sought (and landed?) others:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1804225844149174753.html

4
Politics & Religion / Brokenists v. Statusb Quoists
« on: February 18, 2025, 10:27:58 AM »
An apt way to look at the current moment, IMO:

The ‘Everything Is Broken’ Administration

‘The choice was between a slow canoe ride through more of the same, or a roller coaster. Americans chose the roller coaster.’

By Oliver Wiseman

02.17.25 — U.S. Politics

Are Elon Musk and the DOGE boys disrupters or vandals? Should Robert F. Kennedy Jr. be in charge of public health? Does the footage of the USAID sign being removed from a government building fill you with excitement or dread? Do Tulsi Gabbard’s criticisms of the “deep state” make her unfit for the role of director of national intelligence—or precisely the woman for the job?

A good predictor of how you answer these questions—better perhaps than whether you are a Republican or a Democrat—is whether or not you are a “brokenist.”

That term, coined by Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse a few years ago, has been bouncing around my head ever since Trump returned to power last month. In fact, I’m increasingly convinced it’s the key to understanding this administration. Allow me to explain.

In January 2021, Newhouse wrote an essay addressing what she would later describe as “the growing sense, made more glaring during the first year of the pandemic, that whole parts of America were breaking down before our eyes.” She argued that major institutions of American life—from the media to medicine—no longer worked. “Everything Is Broken,” was Newhouse’s unsparing conclusion—and the essay’s memorable headline.

Almost two years later, Newhouse wrote a follow-up, titled “Brokenism,” which translated the ideas of her first essay into a new political rubric. The most important divide in our politics, she argued, wasn’t between left and right, but between “brokenists” and “status-quoists.” Brokenists can be on the left or the right, or in the middle, but they agree that “what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.” Status-quoists, by contrast, “are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled.” Bernie Sanders? Brokenist. Liz Cheney? Status-Quoist. Or—to pick further examples Newhouse doesn’t name in her piece—Joe Rogan? Brokenist. Matthew Yglesias? Status-quoist. (Presciently, Newhouse identified Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk as two tech world brokenists—two years before they would come out for Trump.)

Newhouse’s argument struck me as obviously true and important back in 2022. It explained how tech, Trump’s first term, Covid, wokeness, and so much else had combined to scramble our politics. After almost a month of Trump’s second term, “brokenism” looks like a more important idea than ever—the thread that connects so much of the revolution underway in Washington, D.C.

Does Newhouse agree? “100 percent,” she said when we spoke over the phone recently. This administration and its supporters are, she said, “a coalition of people who feel that whole parts of America’s governing bodies have decayed past the point of usability.”

J.D. Vance more or less tweeted as much last month when—in a push to secure the votes needed to confirm Gabbard as Trump’s intelligence chief and RFK Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services—he wrote that these former Democrats “represent parts of the new coalition in our party. To say they’re unwelcome in the cabinet is to insult those new voters.”

In other words, what binds that new coalition is brokenism.

Gabbard, a military veteran and former Democratic lawmaker from Hawaii, was picked because she, like Trump, believes our intelligence agencies are broken. “For too long, faulty, inadequate, or weaponized intelligence has led to costly failures and the undermining of our national security,” she said in the opening statement of her confirmation hearing.

At his confirmation hearing, RFK Jr. took aim at a broken health system. The U.S. “has worse health than any other developed nation,” he said. The fact that he has long been pro-choice—a stance he only started to move away from after joining Trump’s team—didn’t matter. Well, it did to the editors of National Review, but the fact that their opposition didn’t make a difference only confirms the brokenism realignment. As does the fact that Chip Roy, a conservative Texas congressman and a staunch pro-lifer, enthusiastically backed RFK’s nomination. Read his explanation as to why in our pages and it’s clear that the thing he and RFK agree on—and the thing that really matters to Roy—is that America’s public health system doesn’t work and requires something more like revolution than reform. Whatever profound differences of opinion they have on other things, including abortion, are secondary.

You might think that the biggest Senate holdouts in the nomination fights over two former Democrats would be ultra-conservatives. Instead they were the self-styled moderates who are generally keen to preach the virtue of bipartisanship. According to the old left-right rules, this makes no sense. Viewed through a brokenist lens, it’s obvious. Mitch McConnell—the only Republican to vote against both Gabbard and RFK—is a quintessential status-quoist.

Time will tell if the brokenist coalition is durable. Indeed, the infighting has already begun. Take, for example, the fight between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon which flared up over legal immigration last month. (Bannon called Musk “truly evil” for supporting H-1B visas for skilled workers.) Their disagreement is broader than that, though. Bannon views Musk as a neoliberal plutocrat and threat to authentic MAGA populism—the problem, not the solution. “Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer,” said Musk in response.

For Newhouse, what’s interesting about the Musk-Bannon debate “is that they’re both brokenists. What they’re fighting about is what to replace it with.”

“It’s part of the reason why I think the right has all this energy,” she said. “Because they’re not having fights about whether or not we should defend the old stuff. They’re having fights about what to replace the old, broken stuff with.”

For others, these fissures show the limitations of the brokenist framework. Yuval Levin is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has spent a lot of time thinking about why we’ve lost faith in our institutions and what to do about it.

“I think it’s not so much status-quoists and brokenists as something more like building crews and demolition crews,” he told me. “There’s work needed. The institutions are broken. I think there’s broad agreement on that. The question is, is the work that is needed demolition or construction?”

Newhouse may be a brokenist, but she’s interested in construction, not demolition. “One of the misimpressions about the piece and about me in general is that I want to burn stuff down,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to use their energy to do that, right? It’s just about where we put our resources. Which institutions are worth putting our energy into?”

Brokenism explains why, for those of us in the news business, every day feels like a week at the moment. Part of this is down to Trump’s own mode of operation: the off-the-cuff remarks, the late-night posts on Truth Social, the almost daily press conferences, the “flood the zone” approach. But the frenetic energy in Washington stems from the fact the brokenists aren’t outsiders any more. They’re in charge.

“Every day feels like a roller coaster,” explained Newhouse, “because now the people who want others to focus on what’s broken are in power, which means we all have to focus on what’s broken every day. We all have to wake up and see some new evidence of some new thing that is broken beyond what any of us could have imagined.

“There was no lever to pull in the last election for ‘change, but make it responsible and well-paced,’ ” added Newhouse. “The choice was between a slow canoe ride through more of the same, or a roller coaster. Americans chose the roller coaster.”

Under Joe Biden, Washington was run by people eager to cover up or minimize problems—including the president’s own mental decline. The new administration sees its job as being to expose those issues for all to see. Whether or not it will fix them is another story.

Levin recognizes the “weirdness” of institutions being run by people whose “basic ambition is to tear those institutions down.” And he’s skeptical that strategy will work: “To run for office and to want to be a public official is to want to be an insider, to think that there is work to be done inside the institutions that could be constructive for society. If you don’t think that, then you’re not really going to be able to play the role that our system assigns to insiders.”

Whether or not the Trump administration is capable of fixing the institutions it considers broken, its efforts to do so will lead to much tension and drama in Washington. For those of us in the news business, it’s been exhausting. And it’s only been a month. But Newhouse thinks it’s invigorating. “The brokenists say, ‘We can do better. We can make something better than this.’ Is it an exhausting challenge? It is. Is it more exhausting to sit in the misery and the stagnation of institutions that are broken? Many Americans certainly think so.”

As Newhouse put it in her essay a little over two years ago: “The ground is moving again. Everything bad comes from change, but so does everything good.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-everything-is-broken-administration

5
Politics & Religion / 60 Minutes at it Again
« on: February 17, 2025, 07:43:25 PM »
Try to pass the speechwriter for Samantha Powers of USAID off as random civil servant impacted by layoffs:

https://revolver.news/2025/02/60-minutes-airs-fake-news-so-egregious-people-are-calling-for-their-license-to-be-yanked/

7
Science, Culture, & Humanities / Re: American History
« on: February 17, 2025, 04:58:48 PM »
Fantastic cliff notes version, Doug!

8
Science, Culture, & Humanities / How Best to Define Life?
« on: February 17, 2025, 04:39:52 PM »
An interesting bit of biological history where a scientist behind the Iron Curtain took a resource allocation perspective when defining life rather than the standard RNA/DNA method. Confess I’m an Ockham’s Razor kind of guy and so generally prefer the simpler way of seeing things, though I think you could argue this Sunday supplement treatment is simplistic: 

https://dailygalaxy.com/2025/02/little-known-scientist-may-have-unlocked-the-secret-to-lifes-origins-on-earth/

9
It’s difficult to feel much sympathy for malign weasels such as these FBI supervisors:

One big issue with the FBI

TOM KNIGHTON

FEB 17, 2025

Photo by Jack Young on Unsplash

President Donald Trump isn’t playing around with the FBI. Many have claimed that he’s engaging in retribution for him being prosecuted, for his supporters being prosecuted over January 6th, and so on.

Tilting At Windmills is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

To be fair, they may have a point. I just don’t care about it all that much after years of Democrats doing the same thing to anyone who disagreed with them.

And it seems that many of those “purged” from the FBI were just the kind of people who liked to do that sort of thing.

Democrats have cast the Trump administration’s ouster of eight senior FBI leaders as a “purge” and act of “retribution” from a weaponized Justice Department, some likening it to President Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”

But former colleagues of the terminated “G-men” say this narrative is backward. FBI officials, past and present, have marshaled significant evidence via whistleblower complaints and testimony indicating that several terminated leaders routinely used their offices for partisan purposes.

These include allegations that at least two of the fired officials, Jeffrey Veltri and Dena Perkins, manipulated the security clearance review process to personally and professionally punish conservatives, COVID-19 vaccine skeptics, and Jan. 6 whistleblowers who reported suspected bureau malfeasance, and retaliated against those who came to the whistleblowers’ defense.

A third, Timothy Dunham, is also alleged to have improperly suspended security clearances.


And let’s understand, these accusations weren’t just fabricated by Republicans, though I know some morons would likely claim they were.

No, these are based on real people with real experiences being the victim of such things.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) read numerous accounts of alleged misconduct perpetrated by these and other officials into the record this morning as the committee considered the nomination of Kash Patel for FBI Director.

One subordinate of the three terminated individuals, a former supervisory special agent in the Security Division, “SecD,” from which Veltri and Perkins hailed, and whom Dunham oversaw, told the committee:

I witnessed abuses committed against multiple employees by FBI senior leaders, particularly by Jeff Veltri and Dena Perkins. I also saw SecD retaliate against five of its own employees for protesting these unlawful practices. Because I spoke out against these abuses, Perkins and Timothy Dunham suspended my security clearance, costing me my job and continuing employment, totaling approximately $700,000 in lost wages and retirement benefits.

Another former FBI official, Marcus Allen, told the committee that Veltri and Perkins “caused the suspension of my security clearance because I questioned whether the FBI Director was truthful to Congress and whether the FBI was obeying the law and Constitution in the January 6, 2021 investigations.” What followed left “financial and emotional damage to me and my family will never be completely restored.”

A third, Special Agent Garret O’Boyle, who has been indefinitely suspended without pay for well over two years in alleged retaliation for whistleblowing, told the committee that Veltri, Perkins, Dunham, “and other leadership up to Christopher Wray, are responsible for what happened to me and my family.”

“Ensuring that they no longer work at the FBI is not retribution; it’s responsible leadership.”


This is absolutely vile.

It’s not like they were sympathetic to terrorist groups. I suspect this bunch would have been fine with that, so long as they were the right terrorist groups.

No, they held different opinions about domestic politics and how the bureau should operate.

What’s more, this is just this one little part of the bureau. What else are we going to find down the road? What else have they managed to hide from the world where we’ll never see it?

The ATF was already a big issue so far as federal law enforcement went, but the FBI is probably even worse when you look at all the ways they can hurt the average American.

I’d like to believe that they wouldn’t go quite that far, but look at all the people they prosecuted for January 6th. They didn’t just go after people who got destructive or violent. They went after anyone who set foot inside the Capitol that day, including journalists reporting on the incident.

If you run afoul of the FBI, as it currently sits, they can and will destroy your life. The process is the punishment. They can and will ruin you if they decide it’s worth it. Just paying attorney fees is more than enough to accomplish that, but the hit your reputation will take is also at play here.

They don’t have to convict you to ruin your relationships, your standing in the community, or anything of that sort.

At least some will figure you just got lucky rather than that you were innocent, and just how many will likely depend on the charges.

Thanks for reading Tilting At Windmills! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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So even if Trump is motivated by revenge, I really can’t feel that bad about it. I watched Obama use the IRS to punish conservatives by holding up non-profit status for groups on the right and I watched Biden (or whoever used him as their own personal Bernie) use the FBI to crack down on his opponents, including the raid of Donald Trump’s home.

Turnabout is fair play, in this case, and if it’s going to happen no matter how much one tries to take the high ground and the media won’t acknowledge that’s happening, then why play nice?

Getting rid of the problem children who are screwing with anyone who won’t toe the line, though, isn’t remotely the same thing as what all we’ve seen from the left over the years.

So no, I’m not upset over it. I just wish it wasn’t warranted.

https://tomknighton.substack.com/p/one-big-issue-with-the-fbi?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true

10
I can foresee more than a few ways this could, uh, go south, though it has likely occurred already. Hopefully this is more of a shot across cartel bows strongly suggesting they mind their p’s and q’s:

@bennyjohnson
·
21m
🚨BREAKING: Mexican Senate gives green light for U.S. Special Forces to enter Mexico and take on cartels which Trump has designated as “terrorist organizations.”

11
Politics & Religion / Waterloo 2.0, this Time w/ Genuine Digital Zombies!
« on: February 17, 2025, 01:13:12 PM »
Elements of this could go more than one place, but given it all backtracks to Trump, I’ll park it here:

☕️ WATERLOO ☙ Monday, February 17, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Deep State's Waterloo moment as DOGE dishes biggest scandal in human history; media's Napoleonic meltdown over Trump tweet; NYT op-ed signals massive win; funemployment in the Swamp; more.

JEFF CHILDERS

FEB 17, 2025

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! The weekend’s news did not disappoint. Prepare for more exposed history in the making. In today’s roundup: in a month of history-making news, the story that rules them all, a genie of disclosure that can’t be stuffed back in the Social Security bottle; Trump’s ninja-level troll and the media’s Napoleonic meltdown over movie quote; Democrat dreams of rescue from dictatorship by the courts ebbs away in brutal NYT birthright op-ed; and funemployment strikes the Swamp amidst enthusiastic draining.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

I confess to feeling lately like I’m starting to overuse words like “historic,” “unprecedented,” “revolutionary,” and “never seen before.” I need more words. But what can I do? We live in a time when centuries of history are being minted in minutes. Regardless, and unapologetically, this next story will blow your socks off.

🔥🔥🔥

We’ve discovered the Great Democrat Zombie Army.


A full decade ago in 2015, the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General reported that 6.5 million active Social Security numbers were assigned to people aged 112 or older, despite there being only 35 such individuals known to be living worldwide. (Robert Kennedy should be happy to hear about this.) That was alarming enough, but in 2023, an expanded audit looked at SSNs aged 100 and up. This time, 18.9 million active SSNs with birthdates of 1920 or earlier lacked a date of death, meaning they are still active.

But last year (2024), PEW Research reported there are only 80,000 living Americans aged 100+, leaving a shocking discrepancy of 18.8 million mysterious perennial people still receiving social security and possibly disability as well, not to mention generous credits from phantom tax returns, and of course, blue state and local benefits.

And of course, these immortal individuals are probably also voting. Voting Democrat.

The IG’s 2023 follow-up report detailed all the Agency’s terrific progress in resolving the problems identified since the earlier 2015 report. In short, the Social Security Administration’s diligent, alert, and apolitical permanent career civil servants grabbed hold of the IG’s 2015 report with both hands and shoved it into the basement furnace.

I, for one, thank the gods of bureaucrats for all the hardworking, non-biased, non-partisan federal workers in the Social Security Administration who concluded, probably right after their 3-mimosa-lunch (held by Zoom), that it was just too hard and too expensive to stop 18.9 million fraudulent social security records by putting a presumed date of death into the date field. It’s no use.

It’s not like it might have made any difference in the 2020 election or anything.

🔥 I’m sure this will (not) shock you. Both times, 2015 and 2023, the media ignored or downplayed the story. A sane person living in pre-Millennial America might assume that the tireless watchdog media, upon learning about the vast numbers of impossibly fake Social Security accounts and the trillions of dollars of attendant waste and fraud would never give the government a moment’s peace until it was fixed.

But no.

We are not surprised. We are scarred veterans of the post-Millennial period, and we understand the media’s main job is not to expose, but to cover up government incompetence — and especially bury any news at all that might fuel legitimate concerns about election integrity.

Not to mention upholding corporate media’s timeless narrative chestnut that entitlement fraud is rare and overhyped and only a right-wing conspiracy theory. That narrative, after all, is as timeless as the millions of zombified centenarian recipients.

In 2015, apart from one-offs in some conservative media (Breitbart, Washington Times, Fox), I could only find a single AP story about the 6.5 million fraudulent Social Security records aged 112+. In 2023, after the SSA’s OIG published its report finding 19 million digitally breathing people over 100 still “alive” in the system, once again, there was mostly media silence. It should have been a five-alarm fire, but only a handful of “far-right” sites mentioned the news (Federalist, Washington Examiner). The usually reliable New York Post only briefly mentioned the OIG report, but even that was buried in a bigger article about government waste generally.

But CNN, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the other major outlets? Crickets. My searches came up empty. It just wasn’t important enough to report.

In the latest electrifying development that will also probably not shock you, DOGE —for the last week slogging through the SSA’s septic systems of archaic paper and antique Cobol software — is beginning to report that the OIG canaries in the SSA mineshaft were, if anything, woefully underreporting the problem.

🔥 Yesterday, apparent DOGE mouthpiece Elon Musk posted a simple database count of active Social Security Numbers by age range. The dumbfounding chart was a political hydrogen bomb, and it speaks for itself:

Apparently, we’ve been operating on the honor system this whole time. We normal, non-civil-service Americans were the only ones who didn’t know. It’s just the latest reason they sneer at us and think we’re stupid and gullible. Those neanderthal conservatives will believe anything. They’re right. We’re the biggest suckers in human history.

I added up the numbers for our cherished, specially abled readers in Portland. Based on Elon’s chart, the total count of active SSNs is 398 million. That means there are +64 million more active SSNs than the entire population of the United States (334 million).

Let me say it again: sixty-four million zombies. Needless to say, it’s totally impossible, at least under our current scientific understanding of human mortality. The diligent, hardworking, apolitical employees in the federal government appear to have diligently preserved a shadow army of dead or nonexistent “Americans” on the books — zombies — with tens of millions of them potentially still receiving benefits, filing tax returns, and “voting” Democrat.

This appears to be a scandal of unfathomable, indescribable, revolutionary proportions. Since I have a very strong feeling that we will not be receiving tax refunds for our cataclysmically misspent entitlements lavished on millions of career criminals, including those inside the government, I say burn it all down.

There is no fixing this. There is no audit big enough. There is no reform package meaningful enough. It is a soul-crushing abomination. It boils the blood. It is enraging beyond explanation. Just napalm the whole Kafkaesque apparatus and start over from scratch.

This scandal will be the Deep State's Waterloo.

🔥🔥🔥

Speaking of French dictators, consider yesterday’s UK Guardian’s breathlessly misleading article headlined, “Trump suggests he’s above the law with ominous Napoleon quote.” What gave media the vapors this time was a classic Trump troll in the form of an uncharacteristically short and muted single-sentence post. To be fair, he posted it everywhere, on Truth Social, on X, and it was re-tweeted on the official White House Twitter account. It simply said:

In no way, of course, did Trump’s post suggest doing anything illegal or unconstitutional. Media had to project and to impute motives to discover Trump’s sinister hidden meaning. Which they did, of course, in spades and with great enthusiasm. See! We told you! He’s a dictator!

But Trump just appeared to be obliquely quoting the 1970 film Waterloo, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, in which the dictatorial frenchman Napoleon said he “did not ‘usurp’ the crown.”

The quip arose during a compelling scene where Napoleon Bonaparte, played by Rod Steiger, addressed his marshals during a critical moment. Pressured to abdicate after a series of military setbacks, Napoleon confronted his marshals, who’d presented him with a paper urging his abdication. In a display of defiance and justification, he soaringly said: “I found the crown in the gutter, and I picked it up with my sword, and it was the people … who put it on my head,” he says. “He who saves a nation violates no law.”

CLIP: Waterloo (1970) - Napoleon trailer (3:38).

The media’s absurd reaction was swift and totally deranged. The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie hysterically called Trump’s latest statement “the single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.” Neocon Never-Trumper Bill Kristol, a living caricature of Godwin’s Law, raced to grab the Hitler comparison, darkly warning that “We're getting into real Führerprinzip territory here.”

Once again, the media owned itself, falling headfirst into Trump’s trap. Meanwhile, the indefensible DOGE disclosures keep escalating—like yesterday’s thermonuclear Social Security nuclear apocalypse. To mix film metaphors, they’re going to need a bigger Deep State.

🔥🔥🔥

Another reason the overwrought ‘dictator’ charges keep falling flat is because Trump keeps following the law. On Saturday, no less than the New York Times ran a narrative-smashing op-ed headlined, “Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship.” The Democrats’ first ‘win’ against Trump is already crumbling—and even the Gray Lady is sounding the retreat. Like Napoleon at Waterloo, they confidently stormed into battle, realizing too late they marched straight into a legal ambush.

On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order ending so-called birthright citizenship for certain children of illegal immigrants. Democrats sued, wailing that his EO violated the 14th Amendment, which provides, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

The key issue, intentionally provoked by the executive order, is what exactly does the Constitution mean by “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States? Federal judges in four states promptly enjoined Trump’s order. One of the judges claimed it “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment.”

But, the article advised, “Not necessarily.”

The Supreme Court has never held that children born to illegal immigrants are citizens — never. But thanks to decades of judicial hand-waving and bureaucratic indifference, citizenship has been quietly doled out with all the discretion of Social Security numbers.

The 14th Amendment’s well-known purpose was to convey citizenship to children of freed slaves. At the time it passed, Lincoln’s administration had rejected the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, and had already recognized free African Americans as citizens. The 14th Amendment resolved the Constitutional crisis in Lincoln’s favor.

The carefully considered article delved into the history of citizenship through the centuries. Then it noted the Supreme Court’s awareness of that storied common law history, which has long provided that only those born “in amity” receive the sovereign blessings of citizenship status:

This isn’t just some obscure legal technicality—the principle was common knowledge at the time the 14th passed. Citizenship was for people who owed allegiance to the U.S., not just anyone who happened to be born here. As our forefathers never fought for millions of imaginary Social Security recipients, the 14th Amendment wasn’t written to pass out citizenship to millions of undocumented invaders lacking loyalty to the country.

This editorial’s publication was a massive shift in the Overton Window, preparing the Times’ readers for bad news. The left’s sacred cow of birthright citizenship is finally getting serious legal scrutiny, and the fact that the New York Times is already conceding ground means they know their side’s legal foundation is much shakier than they’ve previously pretended.

🔥🔥🔥

The Swamp is going to need a bigger unemployment database. CNBC ran a story yesterday headlined, “Unemployment spikes in Washington, D.C., as Trump and Musk begin efforts to shrink the government.” The sub-headline added, “Jobless filings in Washington, D.C., surged to 1,780 for the week ending Feb. 8, a +36% increase from the prior week.” Pro tip: get out of Washington.

During the disastrous Obama-era economy, as jobs for people outside government crashed and burned, Nancy Pelosi infamously coined the term “funemployment.” The fossilized Speaker urged people collecting generous government unemployment benefits to spend time traveling, writing poetry, painting landscapes, and starting up NGO’s to teach transgender basket-weaving techniques to Namibian kindergartners.

It’s fun!

During the first two years of the pandemic, as ordinary Americans lost our jobs and small businesses by the millions, we were constantly assured by our federal betters that we were sacrificing for the common good. Meanwhile, the federal workforce metastasized, swelling like a taxpayer-funded tumor. Government workers got paid to ‘work from home’—which meant collecting full salaries, grant payments, and dead grandmothers’ Social Security checks between Netflix binges.

Maybe now it’s federal workers’ turn to sacrifice something for the common good.

Prepare for corporate media to circulate their perennial “hardest hit” sob stories, interviewing scores of bizarrely named ex-federal workers on food stamps who used to work on critically important projects like measuring the immeasurable land speed of treadmilled tortoises, mapping the astonishing diversity of prairie dog dialects, or making sure dead people kept getting their Social Security checks.

But remember: Trump gave them a chance. He offered eight month’s severance to any federal worker that wanted to take the deal. They didn’t take the deal.

There’s an old saying about making your own bed. It goes something like, if you make your own bed, you have to clean out the cheeto crumbs by yourself. Or words to that effect. They made their own beds. Don’t fall for media guilt manipulation.

Trump promised to drain the Swamp, and he meant it, this time. I’d only ask that he turn the draining machine up to 11.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/waterloo-monday-february-17-2025

12
Politics & Religion / High End Centurians on Social Security Rolls
« on: February 17, 2025, 10:27:07 AM »
Jeepers, I hope we've dispatched social science grad students to capture the oral histories of the ~1.5 million citizens that were alive during the Civil War.... :roll:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076

13
Politics & Religion / Re: USAID, Samantha Power
« on: February 17, 2025, 10:15:30 AM »
Amen.

I don't want to look backward. I don't want to be vindictive. But it isn't right that all this happens without consequence.

Good point. And to be clear, vindictiveness is not my goal. Hell, let them all walk scot-free so long as they allocute in total to all acts underwritten by GONGO. All has to be left in the open for anyone to evaluate before any subsequent trip to the ballot box, laid out is such a way it can't be walked back, written off, of denied when expedient to do so. These folks spent a lot of years concealing basic fiscal facts and their consequences from the American public; a commensurate amount of time and revelatory energy now must be spent showing the public all that was previously and intentionally kept well hidden.

14
Cracking down on human sex trafficking, namely horrible crimes against women, it perplexes me that so-called liberals weren't already all over this problem. And now they will predictably show no support for its solution. All because they hate you know who.

Add to that calculation "Progressive" willingness to march hand in hand with regressive Muslim fundamentalists that force women to wear head to toe black frocks--denying them the right to even drive, much less vote--and gleefully torture homosexuals before tossing them off rooftops and you are left unable to take any position they embrace seriously.

15
Politics & Religion / How Marxist want you to Celebrate President's Day
« on: February 17, 2025, 09:58:34 AM »
The number of self-owns in the press release below or the attached video I sat through so you don't have to (for the sake of all that's sacred DON'T read the freaking comments) is a sight to behold. One of the most bewildering aspects of this bit of "Progressive" business as usual involves the "grassroots" beard they incessantly try to wave in your face despite all the GONGO revelations that demonstrate full well their orgs all are soup to nuts government funded, astroturf bearded, marxist infiltrated, constructs founded on deception, bulwarked by deception, deceptively marketed meta versions of a freaking herd of Trojan horses, and they think so little of us they maintain the fiction long after that herd of horses have left their GONGO gazebos. Yo "Progressives," we don't care if you roll out the front men from ZZ Top or Methuselah himself: it's still the same three commie chords behind those gnarly beards and we know it.

But hey, keep deceiving yourself as the time and energy you pour into that is time and energy you aren't applying elsewhere.

BTW, if you make the mistake of watching the video or reading the comments note the permissions subtext contained in both. They are seeking to connote the situation is so dire that any action embraced as a form of "resistance" is okay, and in fact justified. These gaslighters that find racist and other dogwhistles in every passing utterance or stray sound (your farts are racist microaggressions as only First World flatulance can indicate such protein rich diet!) worry not at all about their tacit calls for anarchy:

The Radical Marxists In Our Midst Are Doubling Down - Happy Not My President Day

SAM FADDIS

FEB 17, 2025

Today is Presidents Day. All across the country activist groups are organizing rallies to protest President Trump’s “seizure” of power and fight against the “oppression” he represents. As usual, the flyers online proclaim that these actions are the work of local Americans spontaneously organizing to save democracy. As usual, this is nonsense, and what we are seeing are actions directed from the center by individuals who want to transform this nation into a Marxist state.

AND Magazine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“ACTION from @50501 movement:

The current administration has clarified that it cares more about profit than people. We as a collective refuse to stand by as they continue to undermine the dignity of our communities. We are not just numbers or consumers. We are the People.

We reject fascism. We reject the oligarchy. We reject the idea that any person’s worth is less than another’s. Together, we are a force for change.

50501 is not just a movement—it’s a national call for justice that’s already making waves. You’ve proven that already. Now, we need you to show up again—for each other, our communities, and a better world.

On February 5th, you showed up for your community in the thousands—and we need you now more than ever. The movement is not over. We are just getting started. On February 17th, 2025, we will unite for the National Not My President’s Day day of action, and we need YOU to be there. We’re asking you again to gather and protest or participate in other ways for our day of action.”

A host of supposed grassroots organizations have put their names on the notices blasted out nationwide, the 50501 Movement, Build the Resistance, No Voice Unheard, and Voices of Florida. All of that is largely window dressing. These actions are the work of a group calling itself Political Revolution. That group was created by individuals connected to Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America.


It is hard to imagine a political grouping more out of touch with reality. Americans just roundly rejected the most radical leftist administration in American history. They are heartily sick of open borders, “gender-affirming care” and the madness of DEI. Americans are scared, drowning in debt, and sick of having the government tell them what to do. They want to be able to balance the checkbook, take the kids on vacation this summer, and make their own decisions about how to live their lives and what pronouns to use.

The people organizing these events think all of that boils down to racism, sexism, and transphobia. They were just getting started when Joe and Kamala’s campaign crashed and burned. It doesn’t matter that the American people support Trump and his actions to date. You don't care what the people think when you are a true revolutionary. You are part of the vanguard. It’s your job to tell the people what they CAN think.

“…We witness, with growing alarm, how our constitutional rights are trampled upon, how the authority of the President is being usurped by those who seek to consolidate power for personal gain. Meanwhile, President Trump systematically dismantles the very guardrails designed to ensure accountability across the branches of government.

We see elected officials shrinking from their responsibility to speak out, paralyzed by fear of losing their political opportunities. But amidst this, we are witnessing an unprecedented wave of unity. People from every background and every corner of this nation are coming together to demand accountability and to push back against the erosion of our rights.

On Monday, we call on organizations and activists across the nation to once again stand united. We will not cede ground to fascism quietly. We will fight back against Project 2025 and we will fight for the future of all of our beautiful communities. We not only owe it to our future leaders, ourselves, but to the activists and people who came before us– This is our moment, and the assignment is clear.

We stand firm at a critical moment in history, demanding that the American people be heard and that the White House be governed by the true will of the people—not by a tech billionaire who seeks to buy influence and control.

Together with our partners—Political Revolution, Voices of Florida, No Voices Unheard, Build The Resistance—we are ready to hold the line. Community is our resistance, community is our strength, and peaceful protest will be one of the ways we will ensure we protect it.”

Press release, 50501 Movement

Self-delusion is a powerful thing. Trump was just elected by a multi-ethnic coalition of working people who are sick of a dysfunctional government run by out-of-touch elitists and professional politicians. They want a good house cleaning in DC and a much smaller, cheaper, less intrusive government. Trump and his team show every sign of giving them that.

On the far-left that is intolerable. The radical Marxists in our midst are doubling down on their resistance, and it will only get worse.

https://andmagazine.substack.com/p/the-radical-marxists-in-our-midst?selection=9f28a764-d285-45bf-b3dd-d594ae0b8333&triedRedirect=true

16
Politics & Religion / Re: USAID, Samantha Power
« on: February 17, 2025, 08:08:01 AM »
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/02/usaid_s_samantha_power_from_journalist_to_global_power_broker_without_accountability.html

All power, no scrutiny.

Funded the covid virus in Wuhan lab, 70 fold more money than Fauci admitted.

Can we sue her for damages?

Were no laws broken?

Wish the piece spoke more to Repub reaction to her nomination as that would likely prove to be a negative map charting who was feeding at the GONGO trough by noting what they DIDN'T ask.

Get 'em all before congress testifying, acknowledge those who have immunity, judiciously grant immunity to those with something to trade, and relentlessly prosecute those that lie under oath say I.

17
Politics & Religion / Re: Catherine Herridge on Awlaki
« on: February 17, 2025, 07:58:38 AM »
TOP LINE

The USAID grift began 30 years ago for the first American targeted for death by the CIA.... 


So, if I'm reading between the lines correctly, the FBI was onto him to some degree, let it slide likely for long game or incompetence reasons, Awlaki assisted w/ 9/11 during this time, then beat feet elsewhere, leaving BHO & the CIA to make him the first American citizen to ride a Hellfire to his 72 virgins? Something very wrong w/ that picture....

18
To be precise, I suspect the point she was attempting to make was that Hitler was able to rise enabled by relatively free speech not that there was free speech after he came to power.
Well yeah, but as a putative professional communicator she did a wretched job of framing it in that manner and clearly was favoring a potential got’cha moment over an informed discussion of the topic.

19
Politics & Religion / The New Moral Majority
« on: February 17, 2025, 07:34:48 AM »
Not exactly the right place to park this, but given as sexual choices, immigration views, and drug legalization are all components here it’s the best I could do. Nut graph, voter aren’t so much concerned about private choices as they are about actions that negatively impact others:

Elon Musk, Ashley St. Clair, and the New Moral Majority
The billionaire has fathered as many as 13 children by four women. But who’s counting? Interestingly, not MAGA Republicans.
By Charles Fain Lehman

ASHLEY ST. CLAIRE (VIA X)

If the announcement Friday by conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair that she is the mother of Elon Musk’s 5-month-old child is confirmed, then the world’s richest man is a father of 13, by four moms. He’s been married and divorced three times, albeit with two of those marriages and divorces involving the same woman.

But who’s counting? Interestingly, not conservative Republicans.

People of all ideologies have various beefs with Musk: He’s too close to China; his electric cars are a subsidized boondoggle; he’s running roughshod over the federal government. One thing he’s rarely if ever accused of, however, is rampant violation of bourgeois morality.

There was a time when Musk’s lifestyle might have disqualified him from the political power he wields in the nominally conservative Trump administration (headed by a thrice-wed president). But Musk’s rise to political power despite his nontraditional family life epitomizes the decline of the old Moral Majority, which once set the culture war agenda for the GOP and even for some moderate Blue Dog Democrats.

Having won in 2016 partly through a tactical alliance with pro-lifers, Trump broke with GOP social conservatives in 2024, vowing to veto an abortion ban, backing marijuana legalization, and claiming to be “the father of IVF.” Some argue that bawdy “Barstool conservatism” now reigns among Republicans, a counterpart to Democrats’ most libertine tendencies.

That’s not quite accurate. There is no longer a constituency for politicizing Americans’ private choices—they can smoke and drink whatever, or sleep with whomever, they please.

But there is a constituency—Trump mobilized it to great effect—that wants to control behavior they see as affecting society at large. They care about which bathroom people use, and about shoplifting at the drug store and IV drug use on the street. Even playboy Musk, who denounced the “woke mind virus” in part because he blamed it for one of his children identifying as transgender, is part of this group. And unlike the old one, the new moral majority is still up for electoral grabs.

The phrase “moral majority” came from the organization founded in 1979 by Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell. Falwell mobilized millions of conservative evangelical Protestants to advocate what they called “traditional family values”: opposition to abortion, divorce, gay relationships, and so on. The voters Falwell inspired became so powerful that they not only helped install Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the White House, but also pushed Bill Clinton to capitulate on issues like the Defense of Marriage Act, which made it federal policy to recognize marriage only between a man and a woman.

Since the Moral Majority’s heyday, though, “traditional family values” have taken a beating. Today, majorities of Americans favor same-sex marriage, identify as pro-choice, and consider divorce morally acceptable. They want decisions about having children—including abortion and in vitro fertilization—left up to parents.

They’re fine with legal weed—Musk famously smoked it on Joe Rogan’s podcast—and gambling. Opposition to pornography has lessened. The personal indiscretions of politicians and their families—from Hunter Biden to Pete Hegseth—no longer yield the same outrage as in the days when Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky was revealed.

In short, Americans no longer want to legislate about what takes place in their own homes, within their own families, or on their own laptops. They don’t like to be told how to live—either by the religious right or, more recently, by the scolding left.


Americans have not stopped making judgments about right and wrong, however. Voters are still motivated—indeed, they’re more motivated than ever—by issues of public behavior. And they are still willing to vote for those who moralize, insofar as they’re doing it about what goes on in the public square.

Take, for example, the debate over gender. According to a recent YouGov poll, Americans strongly favor discrimination protections for transgender people, including in the workplace. But a sizable majority also believes that gender “is determined by sex assigned at birth.” And they don’t support others’ opinions about gender being imposed on women’s sports, bathrooms, or schools. People are free to be transgender, says the consensus, but not to shape public spaces around their identity.

Or consider marijuana. A recent poll from my colleagues at the Manhattan Institute found that Americans strongly support legalizing personal use and possession of pot. But they also want bans on smoking it on public transit, in bars and restaurants, and near schools. Your pot is fine, in other words, so long as I or my children don’t have to smell it. More generally, Americans keep voting against leniency on public drug use and homeless encampments.


FENTANYL USERS IN SAN FRANCISCO, MAY 16, 2024. (PHOTO BY TAYFUN COSKUN/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Even Trump’s signature issue, immigration, has a public morality angle. Americans have turned sharply in favor of less immigration. But they still believe immigration is good for the country, and are much more likely to blame illegal than legal immigrants for dysfunction. What changed was the disorder at the southern border under the Biden administration, and the spillover effect on schools, housing, and welfare rolls in blue states.

These concerns are not “moral” in the conventional sense—objecting to the stench of pot or the demands of too many immigrants is not a statement about the rightness or wrongness of pot-smoking or immigrating per se. But while Americans no longer judge the intrinsic morality of others’ acts, they still judge. Specifically, they judge when others’ behavior harms or inconveniences those around them. Our laissez-faire attitudes stop where others’ actions affect us.

The distinction between public and private was made particularly salient by the cultural revolutionaries of the summer of 2020. Radical social justice advocates noticed that Americans had grown more permissive of private indiscretion and inferred that they could push for public tolerance of deviance. A ballot measure that decriminalized possession of small amounts of drugs in Oregon, and Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance’s announcement he would no longer prosecute prostitutes, followed. The backlash against these policies—Oregon’s repeal of decriminalization, or California’s new, tougher property crime law—shows that one kind of permissiveness does not beget the other.

Both Democrats and Republicans will need to contend with this new moral majority. For Republicans, that means making room in a party that until recently had strong views on private behavior; their arguments will now need to be made in terms of the public good. For Democrats, it means belatedly recognizing that moral permissiveness is not a license to introduce social anarchy.

Trump understood the new moral majority. So do Congressional Republicans like Rep. Mike Lawler, who won reelection in his New York swing district with ads claiming “there can be no place for extremism in women’s healthcare.” Democratic Representative Seth Moulton, who after the presidential election came out against transgender girls’ participation in girls sports, gets it, too.

The new moral majority is still up for grabs. Both sides could still capture the votes of the elderly woman sick of smelling pot when she goes for a walk; of the gay dad who objects to drag-queen story hour at his kid’s school; of the couple who had kids by IVF but can’t stand Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. And given the lopsided support for such views, whoever wins those votes will attain a powerful constituency.


Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

https://www.thefp.com/p/elon-musk-ashley-st-clair-and-the

20
Politics & Religion / Re: Political Economics, Calvin Coolidge
« on: February 17, 2025, 06:22:09 AM »
"President Harding had slashed the top income tax rate from 71 percent to 46 percent. However, Coolidge went further. He signed into law three Revenue Acts that reduced the total tax rate to 25 percent. Secretary of Treasury Anthony Mellon coined the phrase “Scientific Taxation,” which turned out to be a winning formula for the 1920s economy.

For instance, the real GDP surged to a yearly rate of 4.7 percent between 1922 and 1929, and the unemployment rate plummeted from 11.9 percent in 1921 to 3.2 percent in 1929. The Coolidge Administration reduced the national debt from $22.3 billion to $16.9 billion (one-third) by producing a surplus each year due to balancing the budget and cutting federal spending. Coolidge was only President for six years but left office with a smaller federal budget than when he arrived in Washington, a feat that no President, Republican or Democrat, has been able to replicate to this day."

He won his election in 1924 with 54% of the vote.  UNFORTUNATELY did not run for reelection in 1928.

https://spectator.org/the-greatest-president-you-never-learned-about/

Taking Trump at face value rarely makes sense. Think you are on the right track here, Doug.

21
Politics & Religion / Of Long Leashes and Auditions
« on: February 17, 2025, 06:19:17 AM »
2nd post.

Another talking point that rears its head has to do with Trump’s ego and ability to share the limelight, with narcissism being the tacit criticism. Alas, he’s not marching to the called tune, witness the splashes Bondi, Vance, Hegseth, Musk, etc. are making.

An interesting point made below: is part of his method of giving a lot of lease part of an audition process to replace him in four years?

Trump shares the spotlight
He can trust Vance, Rubio and Hegseth to speak for MAGA
FEB 17, 2025

At the annual Munich Security Conference last week, Trump wanted to blast Eurocrats with the sobering truth that the USA is no longer interested in being their unpaid security staff. So he sent Vice President JD Vance to deliver the message.

Vance shocked the Europeans to the core:

The threat that I worry the most about vis a vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy. But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.

Vance told it like it is as if he were Vice President Howard Cosell:

Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential—and trust me, I say this with all humor—if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

Vance was not the only Trump official to enjoy a moment in the spotlight.

Pete Hegseth also laid down the law in Brussels:

A durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again. This must not be Minsk 3.0. That said, the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.

Instead any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.

If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. And they should not covered under Article 5. There also must be robust international oversight of the line of contact.

To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine.

To further enable effective diplomacy and drive down energy prices that fund the Russian war machine, President Trump is unleashing American energy production and encouraging other nations to do the same. Lower energy prices coupled with more effective enforcement of energy sanctions will help bring Russia to the table.

Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.

This met with NATO feathers ruffled and neocon tut-tutting.



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The subject came up in one of Trump’s Oval Office chit chats with the press.

Reporter: Senator Roger Wicker said it was a rookie mistake for Hegseth to outline what would or would not happen as far as Ukraine’s membership in NATO.

Trump: I haven’t heard that. Roger is a very good friend of mine. Pete has been doing a great job.

Reporter: Were you aware of what Hegseth was going to say in his speech at NATO?

Trump: Generally speaking yeah. I’ll speak to Roger. I’ll speak to Pete. I’ll find out.

Hegseth is Trump’s man. Trump gave him the long leash. I like that.

I also like that former rival Rubio is getting his moment in the sun. He went to Latin America and laid down the law to Panama and others while Bukele feted Rubio in El Salvador.

LeMonde reported:

During a tour of five Central American countries, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio made sure it was known that the region was a priority to the United States. Ending his tour on Wednesday, February 5, Rubio's trip first trip abroad drew attention to Central America, presented by the Trump administration as a source of immigration and a region where China's presence harms American interests.

The first stop on this tour, in Panama on Sunday, February 2, was the most closely followed, following Trump's threats to take back the canal, claiming the neutrality treaty governing it had been violated by the presence of Chinese companies. As soon as Rubio got back on the plane, Panama announced its exit from the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, even though it had been the first Latin American country to join in 2017.

I have noticed a pattern. Trump is sharing the spotlight this time. The self-promotion is still there as after 50 years of media spotlight, this is engrained in Trump. But he also is sitting back and letting a new generation garner attention.

Sharing is caring, but Sharon isn’t Karen

Share

Certainly Elon Musk has enjoyed even greater celebrity than ever under President Trump. Musk is taking the heat for the mass layoffs but as you read the sob sister stories just remember anyone fired was offered an eight-month paid vacation and rejected the buyout.

The rise of these new MAGA faces is intentional.

My guess is Trump at 78 knows the sand is running out of his hourglass. He wants not only to complete the task but also a generation of warriors to carry on the MAGA Movement. Nixon was saddled with Ford. Reagan with Bush. Heck, Coolidge with Hoover. Each successor undid the master’s work.

Trump likely does not wish to repeat that so he has surrounded himself with like minded men and women who basically are auditioning for his job.

The public likes what he is doing. Axios reported to its dismay, “Every Arizona swing voter in our latest Engagious/Sago focus groups said they approve of President Trump's actions since taking office—and most also support Elon Musk's efforts to slash government.”

The story also said:

Some would like to see him do more, sooner, to rein in consumer costs. But several said they don't mind that Trump's early actions haven't primarily focused on inflation—even when that was their top issue in the election—and said they can be patient if prices don't come down for a while.
Several doubt the warnings that tariffs may translate to long-term price increases for American consumers.
Several expressed views that "waste, fraud and abuse" are so prevalent that government agencies can be slashed or eliminated without hurting services on which they depend.
As Frank Sinatra sang, “Love is lovelier the second time around/ Just as wonderful with both feet on the ground.”

Bondi, Noem and even Lee Zeldin are getting their media time. Tom Homan is a more familiar face on cable now than the Kardashians. He couldn’t get more time if he sold pillows with OxyClean.

Leave a comment

This Cabinet and Musk and Homan are better than Trump’s first Cabinet because they are in tune with the president and loyal to the MAGA movement. Well, maybe not RFK Jr. but he is coming around.

Don’t worry about Trump’s ego. He still garners attention. He became the first president to attend a Super Bowl and on Sunday, he was at the Daytona 500.

Trump will make America great again. But to keep it great will require young leadership (Vance is all of 40) to preserve it. I think that is behind Trump’s use of surrogates to spread the word.

Plus he doesn’t have to travel as much.

https://donsurber.substack.com/p/trump-shares-the-spotlight?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

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Let the hand wringing begin:

Trump’s Opening Move Against Migrant Sex Trafficking

MIGRANT GIRLS IN TAPACHULA, MEXICO, AWAIT RESOLUTION AFTER THEIR FAMILIES’ CBP ONE APPOINTMENTS TO TRAVEL TO THE UNITED STATES WERE CANCELED. (JOSE EDUARDO TORRES CANCINO VIA GETTY IMAGES).

“The pervasive fraud in the sponsor process is undeniable,” said the new head of the agency that cares for migrant teens. She’s right.
By Madeleine Rowley


Mellissa Harper, who was installed a few weeks ago as the temporary head of the federal government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), is wasting no time making important and necessary changes to the agency’s infamous Unaccompanied Alien Children program. On Friday, the agency released new guidance that will make it more difficult for members of transnational criminal organizations and pimps to “sponsor” teenage migrants and then traffic them for sex or labor. The problem grew significantly under the Biden administration, with three times more victims applying for government benefits under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act during the Biden administration.

The most significant change is that all potential sponsors must be fingerprinted, and the fingerprints must be sent to the FBI to check for criminal records. No child will be released to a sponsor until their fingerprints are recorded in the unaccompanied child’s file. In addition, all identification documents must be legible and unexpired.

Critics of the Trump administration’s immigration policy complain that cumbersome fingerprinting and identification rules could delay the vetting of sponsors, leading to a backlog and overcrowding in shelters that house unaccompanied children. They also fear that under Harper, who has been an official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement since 2007, ORR will share information about the sponsors, most of whom are illegal immigrants themselves, with ICE, making it easier to arrest and deport them. But Harper was unapologetic in an email to the ORR staff. “The pervasive fraud in the sponsor process is undeniable,’ she wrote.

She’s right.

Last October, The Free Press published an exposé about the explosion of labor and sex trafficking by transnational criminal organizations operating in the U.S.—trafficking enabled in no small part by the Biden administration’s open border policies. Gang members and others who were essentially pimps took advantage of the system by claiming to be “sponsors” of unaccompanied teens who were being housed temporarily in shelters run by federally contracted NGOs.

With record numbers of unaccompanied teens crossing the border (over 149,000 in fiscal year 2022 alone), the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) was eager to move them out of the shelters to make room for the next influx—and to do that, they were willing to cut corners at the expense of the migrant children’s safety.

Although regulations promulgated by ORR called for potential sponsors, under certain circumstances, to be fingerprinted, some children were released to sponsors while the results were still pending, as a government watchdog agency reported in February 2024. And potential sponsors, knowing that no one at these NGO shelters was looking too closely, often submitted documents and signatures that were blurry or illegible. In fact, toward the tail end of the Biden administration, the ORR had proposed new regulations that would make fingerprinting and several other provisions meant to safeguard unaccompanied migrants “optional.”

Tara Rodas, a whistleblower who has documented that fraud, told The Free Press, “We can’t continue to prioritize the anonymity of the sponsors over the safety of the children.” Rodas, 56, a federal employee, was shocked by the problems she witnessed while volunteering at an ORR-run shelter for unaccompanied children in 2021. “These new changes are basic, commonsense things and are the bare minimum for a program wrought with fraud.”

According to another whistleblower, Mayra Moreno, 44, who worked as a case manager for a federal contractor in 2021 to help unite unaccompanied children with sponsors, potential sponsors often sent grainy and fraudulent-looking photos of identification documents via WhatsApp as proof of identity. The new system requires potential sponsors to show up in person for their fingerprinting appointment with original, unexpired identification documents in hand.

“There are criticisms that these new rules will discourage sponsors from coming forward to claim unaccompanied children, but frankly, these children might be better off in government custody than with some of these so-called sponsors,” Florida prosecutor Rich Mantei told The Free Press. “I applaud this small step toward making it much safer for these children. It’s good, it’s positive, but it’s not enough, in my opinion.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/trumps-opening-move-against-migrant

23
Politics & Religion / FAFO Heavy Metal AI Video
« on: February 17, 2025, 05:33:10 AM »
It's got a great beat I can bang my head to and is sure to trigger "Progressives" and perhaps cause them to wet the bed. I give it a 17 out of 10:

https://x.com/JimFergusonUK/status/1890709294456156232

24
Politics & Religion / Peace Talks Supposedly Sans Ukraine
« on: February 17, 2025, 04:45:28 AM »
It appears the talking point du jour in Dem circles is that Ukraine peace talks began without the Ukraine, as though speaking to one side and then the other as a prelude to something further is unprecedented. Some of the stretches made by the MSM to ding Trump—stretches they would have spared Biden—are sights to behold. Note, additional asshattery also available at the same link:

Morning Report — Trump is starting Ukraine peace talks — without Ukraine
The Hill News / by Alexis Simendinger / Feb 17, 2025 at 6:28 AM
In today’s issue: 

U.S. prepares for Russia talks without Ukraine
Congress upheaval over DOGE
Trump czar denies mayor got a DOJ deal
Gaza ceasefire shaky but in place
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The latest in politics and policy. Direct to your inbox. Sign up for the Morning Report newsletter
The Trump administration will meet this week with Russian officials to discuss an end to Russia’s three-year invasion of Ukraine — but no delegation from Ukraine is scheduled to take part.

The meetings, hosted in Saudi Arabia, will feature a cadre of high-ranking U.S. officials — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff — working to fulfill President Trump’s long standing campaign pledge to end the war in Ukraine. Rubio landed in Saudi Arabia today, and Kremlin officials confirmed they will be arriving today for talks beginning tomorrow, focusing on restoring ties, Ukraine and preparing a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump.

The trip follows a recent phone call between Trump and Putin,in which Trump said the two leaders “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” The call upended years of U.S. policy, ending Moscow’s isolation over its February 2022 invasion. Trump spoke separately with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Notably absent from the meeting roster: U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg, as well as Ukrainian officials. A Ukrainian official said a delegation from Kyiv is in Saudi Arabia to pave the way for a possible visit by Zelensky. Trump on Sunday told reporters Zelensky “will be involved” but did not elaborate on the role he’d play in the talks. The Ukrainian president on Sunday traveled to Abu Dhabi, where his agenda was not immediately clear.

Rubio told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday “we have a long ways to go” before commencing any potential peace talks with Russia aimed at ending the war, adding that “nothing has been finalized” regarding upcoming meetings.

“We stand ready to follow the president’s lead on this and begin to explore ways, if those opportunities present itself, to begin a process toward peace,” Rubio said.

▪ The Wall Street Journal: Russia’s advance in Ukraine is slowing. Here’s what’s happening and why.

▪ Reuters: The U.S. has asked its European allies what they would need from Washington to participate in Ukraine security arrangements.

During a Saturday speech at the Munich Security Conference, Zelensky said Ukraine must be involved with any negotiations to end the war.

“Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs,” he said. “No decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine, no decisions about Europe without Europe.”

Senior administration officials, including Vice President Vance, Rubio and Kellogg had huddled in Munich last week, where the Russia-Ukraine war was a critical topic of discussion. On Wednesday, Zelensky rejected an offer by the Trump administration to relinquish half of the country’s mineral resources in exchange for U.S. support. Zelensky said he rejected the deal because it did not tie resource access to U.S. security guarantees.

As Ukraine remains iced out of the Trump administration’s peace talks, Europe is scrambling to respond. French President Emmanuel Macron will host European leaders today for an emergency summit on the Ukraine war after U.S. officials suggested Europe would have no role in any talks on ending the conflict.

Macron’s office said the “consultation talks” would address the tumultuous change in the U.S. approach to Ukraine and the attendant risks to the security of the European continent.

In a Sunday interview on Fox News, Waltz said U.S. negotiators “will bring everyone together when appropriate,” while specifying that the Europeans will be expected to “provide long-term military guarantees.”

▪ CNN: An isolated Europe worries the U.S. will negotiate on Ukraine badly without it.

▪ NPR: European leaders scramble ahead of Trump's Ukraine summit with Putin.

▪ The Guardian: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer — who raised the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine — will discuss the views of European leaders when he visits Trump at the White House at the end of this month.

▪ The Hill: The foreign minister of Poland, Radosław Sikorski, said that a united European army “will not happen.”

New targets: On NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Zelensky said his country has intelligence that Putin plans to target Russia-friendly Belarus and warned against the weakening of NATO.

“And at that moment,” Zelensky continued, “knowing that he did not succeed in occupying us, we do not know where he will go. There are risks that this can be Poland and Lithuania because we believe — we believe that Putin will wage war against NATO.”

SMART TAKE with NewsNation’s BLAKE BURMAN

Blake Burman, who hosts “The Hill” weeknights, 6p/5c on NewsNation, is off for President’s Day and returns Tuesday.

https://thehill.com/newsletters/morning-report/5148844-morning-report-trump-is-starting-ukraine-peace-talks-without-ukraine/



26
Politics & Religion / Income Tax Fare Thee Well?
« on: February 16, 2025, 08:14:36 PM »
If Trump could pull this off, it would put “Progressives” back on their heels for a generation:

Glenn’s Substack

Abolishing the Income Tax
Something that might actually happen? And the implications go beyond lower taxes.
GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS
FEB 16, 2025
Could we look for an end to the individual income tax? Maybe.

President Trump has talked about ending the income tax and replacing it with tariffs and spending cuts. Most people pooh-poohed that as unrealistic. But lots of Trump talk that was dismissed as unrealistic is coming true in the era of DOGE.


Blogger Brian Wang thinks it’s a realistic possibility that a the income tax could go. He writes:

Getting to $1.2 trillion of spending cuts is very doable. This could then boost GDP growth to 4-5% per year and reduce interest rates to 2-3% which would cut another $300-400 billion of interest payments.

I know people have trouble believing these things will happen but a lot of it is clearly being executed. . . .

The bills are coming from congress to officially reorganize or virtually eliminate agencies.

The federal government brought in $2.18 trillion in individual income tax revenues. Elon Musk has predicted $2 trillion in savings through DOGE-inspired cuts. Reduced interest rates on the federal debt brought about by reduced spending would cut outlays further.

Estimates are that a 10% universal tariff would bring in about $2 trillion in revenues. Under these circumstances, it’s realistic to talk about abolishing the income tax and still paying down the national debt.

But I’d like to talk about something else: The savings, in money, time, aggravation and psychological stress, and the increase in freedom and privacy that would go with abolishing the individual income tax.

I asked GrokAI about some of these issues (I’m increasingly experimenting with AI platforms for research) and it gave me this:

One of the most immediate benefits for individual taxpayers would be the elimination of time spent on tax-related activities. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) estimates that the average individual taxpayer spends approximately 13 hours per year preparing and filing their federal income tax return, according to the IRS Paperwork Reduction Act compliance estimates for Form 1040 (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf). This figure includes gathering records, completing forms, and ensuring compliance with tax laws. For the roughly 150 million individual tax returns filed annually, this translates to nearly 2 billion hours collectively spent on tax preparation.

If personal income tax were eliminated, this time could be redirected to more productive or personally fulfilling activities. For example, a taxpayer earning the median U.S. hourly wage of approximately $30 (as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm) could effectively "save" $390 worth of time annually (13 hours × $30/hour). For higher earners or those with more complex tax situations—such as self-employed individuals or those with investment income—the time savings could be even greater, often exceeding 20–30 hours per year due to additional forms and schedules.

Moreover, the time spent on tax preparation does not account for ongoing record-keeping throughout the year. Taxpayers must track income, deductions, charitable contributions, and other financial activities, often requiring hours of organization and documentation. A study by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF) suggests that small business owners and self-employed individuals may spend up to 80 hours annually on tax compliance (https://www.ntu.org/foundation/detail/the-hidden-cost-of-tax-compliance). Eliminating personal income tax would free up this time, allowing individuals to focus on work, family, or leisure.

Effort Savings

Beyond the quantifiable hours, the mental and emotional effort required to comply with the U.S. tax code is substantial. The federal tax code is notoriously complex, spanning over 70,000 pages when including regulations and guidance (https://www.taxnotes.com/featured-analysis/how-long-tax-code). This complexity forces many taxpayers to expend significant cognitive effort to understand their obligations, identify deductions, and avoid errors that could trigger audits or penalties.

For individuals, this effort often manifests as stress and anxiety, particularly during tax season. A 2019 survey by the American Psychological Association found that 60% of Americans reported feeling stressed about money, with tax-related concerns ranking high among financial stressors (https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2019/stress-america-2019.pdf). Eliminating personal income tax would alleviate this burden, reducing the need to decipher tax laws or worry about compliance mistakes.

The effort savings would be even more pronounced for specific groups, such as freelancers, gig workers, and small business owners, who must navigate additional complexities like quarterly estimated tax payments and self-employment taxes. For these individuals, the elimination of income tax would remove the need to calculate and submit multiple payments throughout the year, streamlining their financial management and reducing administrative effort.

Expense Savings

The financial costs of tax compliance represent another significant burden for individual taxpayers. These expenses include payments to tax professionals, software purchases, and other out-of-pocket costs associated with filing returns. According to the IRS, approximately 60% of taxpayers hire a professional to prepare their returns, while 30% use tax preparation software (https://www.irs.gov/statistics/filing-season-statistics). The average cost of professional tax preparation ranges from $150 to $300, depending on the complexity of the return, as reported by the National Society of Accountants (https://www.nsacct.org/tax-prep-fees). For those using software, costs typically range from $30 to $100 per year.

For the 150 million tax returns filed annually, these costs add up quickly. Assuming an average professional fee of $200 for 90 million returns (60% of filers) and an average software cost of $50 for 45 million returns (30% of filers), the total direct cost of tax preparation exceeds $20 billion annually ($18 billion for professionals + $2.25 billion for software). Eliminating personal income tax would erase these expenses entirely, putting billions of dollars back into taxpayers' pockets.

Additionally, taxpayers incur indirect costs related to tax planning and compliance. For example, individuals with investment income or rental properties often hire accountants or financial advisors to optimize their tax strategies, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars annually. The Tax Foundation estimates that the total compliance cost of the U.S. tax system, including both individual and business taxes, exceeds $400 billion per year (https://taxfoundation.org/compliance-costs-irs-regulations/). While not all of this pertains to personal income tax, a significant portion—likely over $100 billion—reflects costs borne by individual taxpayers. Eliminating personal income tax would eliminate these expenses, providing substantial savings.

Broader Economic and Social Implications

The savings in time, effort, and expense would have ripple effects beyond individual taxpayers. For instance, the reduction in administrative burden could boost productivity, as individuals redirect their time and energy toward work or entrepreneurial pursuits. A study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University suggests that simplifying tax compliance could increase GDP by up to 1% annually by reducing deadweight losses associated with tax administration (https://www.mercatus.org/publications/economic-growth/cost-tax-compliance).

Socially, the elimination of personal income tax could reduce inequality in tax compliance burdens. Lower-income taxpayers, who often lack access to professional tax assistance, disproportionately spend time and effort navigating the tax system or risk errors that lead to penalties. Wealthier taxpayers, by contrast, can afford advisors to minimize their tax liability. Eliminating the income tax would level the playing field, ensuring that all taxpayers benefit from reduced complexity and cost.

From Claude AI I got this:

Beyond direct expenses, tax compliance diverts resources from more productive uses:

Business expansion opportunities missed due to time spent on taxes
Investment opportunities foregone due to record-keeping burden
Family time sacrificed during tax season
Creative and entrepreneurial projects delayed
If personal income tax were eliminated, these resources could be redirected to more productive activities. Businesses could focus more on growth and innovation rather than compliance. Individuals could pursue additional education, spend more time with family, or engage in community activities.

The National Taxpayers Union Foundation estimated that Americans spend around 6.5 billion hours annually on tax compliance activities. Using more conservative estimates, and accounting only for documented costs, the total compliance burden for individual taxpayers likely exceeds $200 billion annually.

Eliminating personal income tax would thus generate substantial savings beyond the actual tax burden:

Economic Benefits:

Increased productivity from time savings
Reduced compliance costs for individuals and businesses
More efficient allocation of professional services
Reduced need for tax-related software and services
Social Benefits:

Reduced stress and anxiety
More time for family and community
Simplified financial planning
Increased transparency in financial decisions
Educational Benefits:

Time and resources redirected to valuable skills
Reduced need for tax-specific education
Simplified financial literacy education
The elimination of personal income tax would represent a significant simplification of life for most Americans. While some record-keeping would still be necessary for business and personal purposes, the extensive requirements for tax compliance would be eliminated. This would particularly benefit small business owners and self-employed individuals who currently face the highest compliance burdens.

I think that these are both correct. (Note that Grok has current access to the Internet, while Claude has to rely on its training data, which are updated periodically, but not super often; but I think Claude is a bit better as a writer).

In addition to these factors, all of which are huge, there is also the matter of privacy. Elizabeth Warren et al. are pretending to worry about DOGE crews being a threat to people’s privacy. But having to give the government all your financial information, including how you earn your money, how much money you have in interest-bearing accounts, what you spend on in terms of deductions, and who you’re supporting is a much, much bigger privacy invasion than names and social security numbers. And the IRS, as we’ve seen, is entirely capable of leaking this information for the most partisan of reasons.

Getting rid of the individual income tax would fix all this, remove a lot of economic distortions, and also eliminate the sense that we’re all just working at the government’s beck and call. It’s something that looked like it could never happen, but now, a lot of things that looked like they could never happen are happening.

https://instapundit.substack.com/p/abolishing-the-income-tax?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

27
Politics & Religion / Carville on Hogg et al
« on: February 16, 2025, 08:02:14 PM »

28
Politics & Religion / Who are these “Palestinians” of Which You Speak?
« on: February 16, 2025, 07:27:39 PM »
Those excusing and embracing terror and other counterproductive acts seek to control the language, too:

https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/02/the-myth-of-palestine-language-manipulation-and-historical-fabrication/

29
Politics & Religion / The Republicans of Yore are No More
« on: February 16, 2025, 01:26:39 PM »
The link below may be misfiled but between this short essay and then the link I think charts changes in the Republican Party.

Has anyone else noticed the Mike Pence-type Republicans and ‘conservatives ’ slinking around defending the vast corruption, graft and fraud network?
 
I wonder why they would do that?

“Don’t question the institutions! My beloved institutions! All is good! The judges are good! The bureaucrats are good! There is no fraud! I’m worried about the departure from the polite norms…”

These simps are worse than Democrats. Democrats love power and will do anything for it. Democrat voters are brainwashed to the point of retardation. Democrat leaders are the biggest beneficiaries of the whole fraud network. All easily understandable.

But the ‘conservatives’ who just can’t hear a bad word said against The Institutions. What are they?

They don’t even need to be on the take in any major way to get like that. They are just people who wank themselves silly thinking about the august institutions.

It doesn’t matter what it is. The FBI. The CIA. The Episcopalian Church. The Chamber of Commerce. The American Bar Association.
 
It could be The National Society for the Advancement of Cats or The League of Unreformed Quiltmakers and you can bet two things:

1. Marxists will turn it into a Marxist shitshow and a bureaucratic money laundering scheme.

2. Conservatives will keep insisting it’s working wonderfully well and deserves huge respect for all the good it does while fiddling themselves in a frenzy.

Just worship the Name of the Thing! Oh, God, oh, god, it’s an institution…it has, I’m going to come now…it has a special LETTERHEAD!
While the populist can only look in total horror at the Marxist crook’s spending and the conservative fool’s masturbatory devotion to the good name of the institutions doing that spending.

Daniel Jupp

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-most-dramatic-narrative-shift-in-modern-history/

30
Politics & Religion / Disbar the ABA
« on: February 16, 2025, 11:42:52 AM »
Guess who is also a recipient of USAID largess?

The American Bar Association Should Probably Be Disbarred

How can an organisation on the take set the rules of ethics for a profession that has long been associated with a lack of ethics?

JUPPLANDIA

FEB 16, 2025

Just a very short further note on the circular money flow of pure corruption behind lawfare 2.0 and the judicial fight against the Trump adninistration spending freezes. A few people have noted the role of the American Bar Association as the provider of the ethics guidelines followed by most States.

The process to remove a federal judge is particularly difficult, requiring an impeachment similar to what occurs against a President. Such a judge also faces a confirmation process to take up the role in the first place. Once in, they are difficult to remove, which makes their ethical character extremely important.

The supposed watchdog of ethics for all lawyers is essentially the American Bar Association.

It is the American Bar Association which sets the ethical rules for lawyers, the code lawyers are supposed to follow to remain within professional ethical guidelines. When a lawyer’s behaviour is considered unethical they are disbarred. Disbarment is actually fairly rare, but most States follow the rules set out by the ABA.

While the ABA can’t circumvent the impeachment process regarding federal judges, so far as I know (better legal minds than mine can answer that), even its public statements can have a significant impact. If the ABA was calling a judge unethical, their position would be untenable. And the ABA has much more influence than that over prosecutors and lawyers generally.

But the American Bar Association is not a neutral guardian of ethics, especially when it comes to judicial lawfare waged in support of the vast fraud that is USAID.

The American Bar Association has itself been a major recipient of USAID funding.

The American Bar Association then dutifully issued a scathing denunciation of DOGE activities and the USAID spending freeze.

Several of the Democrat Judges ruling against Trump spending policies have themselves received USAID funding or shown that should recuse themselves from key USAID cases.

Bringing personal feelings to a case and having conflicts of interest are of course ethical violations of a judicial role.

Judge McConnell called Trump a tyrant in 2021. He personally donated $700,000 to two Democrat Senators who then recommended to Obama that he be appointed as a federal judge. These Senators both refused to recuse themselves from the confirmation vote on McConnell getting a lifetime judicial post. McConnell has refused to recuse himself from cases against the Trump administration.

Judge Amir Hatem Mahdy Ali is a Canadian born Biden appointment. He was President of a Soros founded NGO that received USAID funding. He has ruled that USAID funding should continue.

Just one Soros organisation received 260 million US dollars from USAID. Soros in turn has funded almost all of the Democrat DA’s and prosecutors engaged in Trump lawfare.

All of the organisations bringing lawsuits against DOGE and the audits and spending freezes have received Soros funding or USAID funding or both.

Judge John Bates who ordered that LGBTQ+ propaganda be restored to government websites is married to Carol Rhees, the founder of an NGO called Hope for Children in Ethiopia, which is funded by (can you guess?) USAID.

These are ethical violations the ABA should be interested in, but the ABA are themselves on the payroll.

The people who set the ethical rules are paid by the people whose spending is being revealed as crooked, and are also effectively in charge of whether lawyers and prosecutors have been unethical, who are then bringing cases and hearing cases which decide that the system paying them or their family members must be continued.

The system is so crooked that the entire ABA membership have a conflict of interest in these cases, and the ABA as an organisation definitely does just as much as these specific judges do.

https://jupplandia.substack.com/p/the-american-bar-association-should?r=2k0c5&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

31
Politics & Religion / The 9-0 SCOTUS Would Appear to Hold Sway
« on: February 16, 2025, 10:00:13 AM »
An apt analysis of the SDNY resignations:

"Fools" Rush In the Department of Justice
Another day, another resignation letter.

JOSH BLACKMAN | 2.14.2025 6:34 PM
The fallout continues from the Eric Adams case. Yesterday, I wrote about Danielle Sassoon's resignation, and Emil Bove's response. Today, Hagan Scotten, another Assistant United States Attorney resigned with a formal letter.

Again, there is much to discuss about the Sassoon-Bove exchange, which I will do in the future after I've had some more time to reflect. Here, I will reflect on one passage in Scotten's letter:

I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.
In recent years, the Department of Justice has prosecuted public officials in high profile cases. In several of those cases, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the convictions.

In McDonnell v. United States (2016), the Court held that an "official act" must involve a formal exercise of governmental power on something specific pending before a public official. DOJ thought it knew what was a proper exercise of government power. The Supreme Court disagreed. Could it be said that the scores of DOJ employees who brought this ill-fated prosecution were "fools"? Do you know who was the Chief of the DOJ Public Integrity Section at the time? Jack Smith. Was it foolish for a prosecutor to indict a former Governor in a case that garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court?

Jack Smith also led the prosecution of John Edwards, the former Senator and Vice Presidential Candidate. Smith relied on a dubious theory of campaign finance law, and the case yielded a deadlocked jury and a mistrial. (When Smith reported that he had enough evidence to convict Trump, I thought back to the Edwards case.) DOJ did not try that theory again. Was it foolish to bring this prosecution of a former public official when the jury wouldn't even convict?

Fast forward to Kelly v. United States (2020). This prosecution arose from the so-called Bridgegate scandal. The United States indicted members of Governor Chis Christie's administration. The Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction. Justice Kagan ruled that the scheme, which did not aim to obtain money or property, could not violate the federal fraud law. Was it foolish to indict a public official in a case that garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court?

In 2023, the Supreme Court decided Ciminelli v. United States and Percoco v. United States. These cases arose over scandal involving funding for a Buffalo Bills stadium project. In both cases, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the convictions. Was it foolish to bring these cases that garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court?

Sensing a pattern? Another public corruption case pending this term, Kousisis v. United States, will likely yield a reversal. And I think the prosecution against Senator Menendez will meet a similar fate, if he is not pardoned. That doesn't even factor in Alvin Bragg's conviction of Trump, which will almost certainly not stand up on appeal. Lawfare all the way down. Maybe, just maybe, federal prosecutors are not in the best position to determine whether public officials abused their power.

I appreciate that Scotten thinks that the Trump DOJ's approach to criminal prosecution is "foolish." I think much the same can be said for how federal prosecutors have approached public corruption cases for some time. And you don't have to take my word for it. Add up all of the unanimous Supreme Court rulings.

What we have here are two very different conceptions of the federal criminal justice system. On the one hand, Sassoon and her colleagues defend the traditional notion that "independent" prosecutors have the power to define what is in the public good. They can define when public officials abuse their power, and can punish those actions with criminal sanctions. (We saw similar arguments during the first Trump impeachment.) Those defending Sassoon are invested in the DOJ club, and the continuation of its longstanding practices.

President Trump, through Bove, articulate a different perspective. The President, as head of the executive branch, can make his own determination of what is in the public good, and determine when public officials are abusing their power. Trump, perhaps more than any living person, is uniquely situated to make this sort of judgment. From the moment he was sworn in, he faced nonstop litigation (remember the Emoluments Clauses?) and two impeachment trials. After he left office, he was indicted in several courts based on novel and dubious theories of criminal liability. Who can forget the efforts to disqualify him under Section 3--which also led to a unanimous Supreme Court reversals? And despite all that happened, Trump still won re-election. Distinguished prosecutors thought they knew what was in the public good. The voters disagreed.

There will likely be more resignations. But I think little more is left to be said here. There are two diametrically-opposed views on display. And only one such view can prevail.

https://reason.com/volokh/2025/02/14/fools-rush-in-the-department-of-justice/

32
Politics & Religion / Several Legit Belly Laughs …
« on: February 16, 2025, 09:19:23 AM »
… found here. My dog is still looking at me like I lost my mind:

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/02/the-week-in-pictures-xmas-morning-month.php

33
Politics & Religion / More on DC Housing Market
« on: February 16, 2025, 08:54:25 AM »

34
Politics & Religion / Canada’s (& Europe’s) Thorough Subversion
« on: February 16, 2025, 08:39:10 AM »
A thoroughly depressing, and perhaps overstated, read regarding the state of Canada, to a lesser yet thorough degree Europe, with a side of US tossed in from grins and giggles:

https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/deport-them-all-the-immigration-consensus?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true(

36
Politics & Religion / The Call Came From Inside the House
« on: February 16, 2025, 07:18:04 AM »
A takedown of European oligarchs in the wake of Vance’s speech:

I told you we were coming to save Europe. Yesterday, Politico ran a shocking story headlined, “Vance brings a wrecking ball to diplomatic gathering in Munich.” It described Vice-President Wrecking Ball’s speech yesterday at the annual Munich Security Conference, which is like Davos for European security policy. My first thought was, the headline should have been, “United States Has a Vice President Who Can Give a Coherent Speech.” I mean, Vance didn’t even mention the passage of time once.

image.png
CLIP: Vance roasts Europeans at their annual military-industrial security conference (18:45).

If you prefer, read Vance’s remarkable “wrecking ball” address for yourself, courtesy of the UK Spectator (and only the Spectator), which published the full transcript headlined, “Read: J.D. Vance’s full speech on the decline of Europe.”

The attendees probably expected something different from last year’s speech by Kamala Harris, ahem, but I bet they never expected this. Instead of the usual dish of asiatic fearmongering—Russia, Russia, Russia, with a side of China, China, China—Vance flipped the script and served them something they’d never tasted: bitter truth.

Vance informed the shocked EU delegates, “the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about most is the threat from within.”

You could practically hear the shocked and deeply offended gasps when he explicitly named Europe’s elites as the real security risk—not Putin, not Xi, but the unelected bureaucrats, the censors, the election tamperers, and the speech police inside their own governments.

Vance came with receipts: he cited example after example of European attacks on free speech and free elections. He mentioned people arrested for silent prayer outside abortion clinics, those jailed for complaining about uncontrolled migration, free elections overturned on thin evidence of “Russian interference,” and of course, all the recent anguish over Elon Musk’s support for a particular populist political party in Germany.

Europe’s leaders love to label their critics as threats to democracy—but democracy’s biggest threat is Europe’s leaders.

Effeminate EU officials rushed to protest Vance’s claims, but the protests only proved the claims were true. Europe’s anti-democratic tailspin is well-known. For example, consider just one headline from the New York Times, published a year ago:

image 2.png
In other words, Vance scolded the astonished audience that, regarding security threats to Europe, the call is coming from inside the house. More simply: they threaten Europe’s security, not Russia, not China, not “disinformation” or even “misinformation.” The real threat is a bloated bureaucracy that silences speech, politicians who erase elections, and entrenched elites terrified by their own electorate.

Vance shattered their safe, sacrosanct security narrative, by pointing out what was obvious to everyone except the effete officials in the room: Europe’s biggest crisis isn’t coming from Moscow or Beijing—it’s coming from Brussels, Berlin, and London. The bureaucrats, censors, and election meddlers masquerading as defenders of democracy are the ones actually dismantling freedom— with rusty pliers.

🔥 Vance’s Munich roast has set the continent aflame. “No one is talking about anything else,” a senior Eastern European official told Politico. A former senior U.S. diplomat told the paper, “It could be this is the one wake-up call that actually wakes Europe up.”

A former House Democratic staffer attending the conference whined, “It’s not Russia influencing your elections, you are? He was blaming the victim.” He added, incredulous, “What the f—k was that? I had my mouth open in a room full of people with their mouth open.” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius grumbled, “If I understood him correctly, he is comparing parts of Europe with authoritarian regimes. This is not acceptable.”

Boris Pistorius overlooked the dripping irony of labeling Vance’s free-speech diatribe as unacceptable speech. A self-own.

Just as Trump has thrown the U.S.’s Deep State and its Democrat operatives into disarray, he is now dismantling, disrupting, and destabilizing Europe’s pampered political class. In a single week, Trump’s team told a gaping-mouthed Europe that: your proxy war is over, your free military protection is about to expire, your trade scam is up, and, brace yourselves—Washington now considers you a bigger threat to democracy than Russia or China.

The Financial Times, Thursday:

image 6.png
A wrecking ball, indeed.

🔥 In the wake of the week’s events, the European continent lies reeling in political, economic, and military disarray. An astonished Carnegie commentary published yesterday observed, “Europe finds itself at a watershed moment in its modern history, facing both a disruptive autocracy in Russia and an ally-turned-bully in the United States.”

They lack options, and it’s their own fault. Russia sanctions made the EU more dependent on the United States than perhaps at any time in history.

Now, Europe is trapped—with no good choices and no way out. Before 2022, Russia was Europe’s primary energy supplier, providing nearly 40% of its natural gas and a significant amount of its oil. But the EU giddily embraced sanctions and sneeringly severed its Russian imports, leading to a predictable energy crisis with skyrocketing prices.

So the U.S. stepped in with LNG (liquefied natural gas) exports, becoming Europe’s largest gas supplier practically overnight.

To make matters worse, Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) didn’t just create inflation—it also gutted Europe’s economy, luring EU industries to America with massive subsidies. The IRA offered $369 billion in subsidies and tax credits for green energy, electric vehicles, and advanced manufacturing—but only if produced in America.

The rush from Europe to the New World was on.

We never heard about it, but some European leaders vainly complained at the time. Headline from Le Monde, 2022:

image 3.png
The IRA was marketed as an “Inflation Reduction” bill, but functioned as a massive industrial heist—with Washington poaching Europe’s factories, capital, and jobs while hapless EU leaders stood around with their hands in their silk-lined pockets. It wasn’t great here either, but Biden’s IRA deindustrialized Europe.

But Putin. If the EU had set out to sabotage itself, it couldn’t have done a better job.

Now, President Trump is weaponizing NATO and the fruits of Biden’s IRA against the EU. Best of all, it can’t blame us. Europe walked into its own trap—crippled by its own sanctions, willfully blindsided by our new “bullying” leadership, and left defenseless by its own weakness.

Where can Europe go for sympathy? Nowhere. It will have to do whatever President Trump wants.

🔥 Lest anyone experience the temptation to any sympathy for our European cousins, let us now recall Europe’s role in the RussiaGate operation—a true act of election interference, if not a coordinated coup to overthrow America’s democratically elected goverment.

image 5.png
The so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence network—the combined deep states of the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—played a central role in fabricating and amplifying the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. British intelligence was involved from the start, with former MI6 agent Christopher Steele authoring the now-debunked Steele Dossier, which falsely painted Trump as a Russian asset using literally unbelievable tall tales like the so-called “pee tapes.”

Meanwhile, British-aligned Australian diplomat Alexander Downer conveniently “overheard” a drunken George Papadopoulos in a London bar, ran to U.S. authorities, and—just like that—Crossfire Hurricane was born.

image 7.png
It wasn’t just the U.K. and Australia. Italy hosted the mysterious Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud, the operative who fed Papadopoulos the now-infamous claim that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. At every stage, foreign intelligence agencies—mostly European—conspired with Trump-deranged operatives in Washington to roll it all up into a giant ball of destabilizing chaos: they laundered lies into investigations, inflated investigations into illegal spying, spun spying into double impeachments, and zoomed the impeachments into a zombie horde of criminal prosecutions.

Europe didn’t just interfere in America’s election—they actively fabricated the mechanism fueling a soft coup against our elected president.

I assume you remember these inexcusable events. Regardless, I can assure you that President Trump hasn’t forgotten. Europe’s daring attempt to destroy our government ripped the mask off the greatest fraud going: neither of our “real enemies” Russia and China tried to overthrow our government like our “real allies” the Europeans did.

Not Iran. Not North Korea. Europe.

At unimaginable personal and political cost, Trump learned the hard truth that the Deep State is distracting us with the wrong enemies. Our real enemies aren’t in Moscow and Beijing. Our real enemies are in Brussels, Berlin, and London. Russia and China are Europe’s enemies. We were never co-strategists. We were never allies. We were just pawns. Pawns in Europe’s game of “let’s you and him fight.”

Now, the coup-plotting Europeans are about to learn an even harder lesson: America knows what you did.

And this time, as America defends herself —ensuring this never happens again— she will also, once again, rescue Europe’s innocent citizens from the Continent’s creeping authoritarianism.

As JD Vance warned Munich’s élites yesterday, “There’s a new sheriff in town.” Let freedom ring.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/freedoms-ring-saturday-february-15


37
I suppose we should start tracking things Dems will drive a stake through the heart of should they get the chance, with JAPH—launched by scientists censored and blacklisted during Covid—being a case in point:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-nominees-debut-new-science-journal-aimed-spurring-scientific-discourse-increasing-transparency

38
Politics & Religion / Swinging the Axe in the Southern District of NY
« on: February 15, 2025, 08:07:59 PM »
There’s a link to an eight page letter you can find if you click the link below that is as thorough a bitchslapping as I’ve seen in a while. Indeed, a couple positions ago I was my civil service unit’s hatchetman and the place where the unit’s problem children would find themselves if they were in need of “performance management.” I’ve written my share of letters like these and confess I found this one to be one of the best daggers to the vocational heart of the matter I’ve seen:

The Hammer Drops at Justice
New leadership and new rules are too much for sanctimonious DOJ employees, who resign rather than follow orders to depoliticize the department.
JULIE KELLY
FEB 15, 2025

Emil Bove, in his typical fashion, was having none of it.

In a scathing nine-page letter, the acting deputy attorney general detailed a long list of insubordination and politicking by Danielle Sassoon, the temporary U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, related to her refusal to drop the federal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams as instructed. Last September, the then-U.S. Attorney for SDNY handed down a five-count indictment against the Democratic mayor, a move some considered political retribution for Adams’ intraparty squabbles with the Biden administration.

Declassified with Julie Kelly is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A review by the Trump Department of Justice, consistent with the president’s executive order to halt the weaponization of the DOJ, determined the investigation into Adams had “accelerated after Mayor Adams publicly criticized President Biden's failed immigration policies,” Bove wrote. Bove, who once worked as a prosecutor in the SDNY office, further explained the case represented “election interference”—Adams is up for re-election this year—and “imposed on Mayor Adams' ability to govern and cooperate with federal law enforcement to keep New York City safe.” (Bove also noted the apparent political aspirations of Damian Williams, her predecessor responsible for the Adams case. Williams landed on Kamala Harris’ short list for attorney general right after announcing the charges; after Trump won, he launched a campaign-style website touting, among other prosecutions, the Adams indictment.)

But Sassoon, also in typical fashion for federal prosecutors, sanctimoniously touted her alleged “principles” and loyalty to the rule of law as reasons to defy Bove’s order. “Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations,” Sassoon, who had been in the post a mere three weeks, wrote. “I understand my duty as a prosecutor to mean enforcing the law impartially, and that includes prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, to the defendant or to those who appointed me.”

Sassoon offered her resignation if Bove did not reverse course. He not only accepted her resignation but announced she would be the subject of investigations by both Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Office of Professional Responsibility.

Who Are the Fools and Cowards?

Others quickly joined Sassoon at the unemployment line—or the line to become the newest MSNBC legal analyst. Six more DOJ officials resigned; Hagan Scotten, one of two prosecutors on the Adams case, tendered his resignation on February 14. “I expect you will find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion [to dismiss]” Scotten, whom Bove had placed on paid leave pending an investigation into his insubordination, wrote.

But if their collective intention was to demonstrate independence and integrity, it achieved the opposite—with the exception of DOJ bootlickers at National Review and the Wall Street Journal. Recent polls indicate historically low levels of support for the DOJ among Republicans, something apparently lost on so-called “conservative” publications.

Americans voted for Donald Trump in a partial repudiation of overzealous government lawyers, the sort perfectly embodied by Sassoon and company, using their unchecked power to imprison those they consider to be on the wrong side of the political aisle.

The exodus represented another in a series of purges, forced and otherwise, at the DOJ since Trump took office. On January 21, at least 15 senior DOJ officials were removed or reassigned. A few days later, several members of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team also were fired. (Smith resigned on January 10.) Dozens of prosecutors who had been hired on a temporary basis to handle January 6 cases were dismissed as the DOJ shuttered the so-called “Capitol Siege” investigation.

At the same time, house cleaning at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is under the purview of the DOJ, immediately got underway. Several top FBI officials were warned to clean out their desks or get the ax. Chiefs at the Miami and Washington field offices, responsible for the reckless armed raid of Mar-a-Lago, were sent packing.

Bove also called out the insubordination of acting FBI director Brian Driscoll, who, like Sassoon, refused to follow orders and produce the names of thousands of FBI employees involved in the unprecedented J6 investigation. (Driscoll reportedly compiled after Bove noted his defiance but sent the names over a classified server. He will be replaced, and possibly fired, next week after Kash Patel takes over.)

Dropping the Adams case not only comports with the president’s depoliticization directive but appears to meet new standards set forth in a February 5 memo by Bondi. She cautioned against bringing reckless cases and warned, “there is no place in the decision-making process for animosity or careerism.” DOJ employees, she reminded her department, are bound by the Justice Manual, which prohibits political or personal concerns related to charging decisions. “These types of considerations, which previously led to the improper weaponization of the criminal justice system at the federal and state levels, as President Trump observed in Executive Order 14147, 90 FR 8235, have no place in the Department,” she wrote.

Which is why the departure of folks like Sassoon and Scotten are welcome news. Their self-serving, media-whoring exit letters have nothing to do with upholding the law and everything to do with advancing their personal and perhaps political interests.

https://www.declassified.live/p/the-hammer-drops-at-justice

39
Politics & Religion / Re: Rules of the Road/Fire Hydrant/Self Intro
« on: February 15, 2025, 06:07:48 PM »
I'm looking for a wonderful post about how DOGE is a rename of an entity created by Obama and how that solves subtle but important issues for our side.

Not exactly what you’re looking for:

https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1890091158107570262

40
Politics & Religion / Kennedy on Trump
« on: February 15, 2025, 06:02:33 PM »
These gents sure don’t live up to their caricatures:

https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1890184952320520521

Speaking of which:

https://x.com/WesternLensman/status/1890526813668991168

41
Science, Culture, & Humanities / A Trip Down Memory Lane
« on: February 15, 2025, 05:33:42 PM »
No doubt corrections were immediately forthcoming once the scope of this Covid folly was fully understood:

https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1890433585015874005

42
Politics & Religion / That Dadratted Memory Hole
« on: February 15, 2025, 05:16:01 PM »
2nd post:

“TRUMP’S DRACONIAN CUTS ARE UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND UNPRECEDENT … ah, what? Clinton and Gore did it too?”

https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1890539598306332754

44
Politics & Religion / Jack Smith Collecting & Copping to Receipts
« on: February 15, 2025, 04:27:07 PM »
Dear me, Jack Smith is feeling the need to keep receipts—what’s the tax on $140K in legal services—while the Deep State is feeling the need to keep him feeling well represented:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/14/jack-smith-justice-department-019350

45
Politics & Religion / Parade Past This, Ya Presstitutes!
« on: February 15, 2025, 03:48:04 PM »
A rouge takes his place in the gallery:

https://share.icloud.com/photos/0d9PEgK89lr3JATaruynxET2w

46
Politics & Religion / Vance on Europe etc. in WSJ Interview
« on: February 15, 2025, 03:42:45 PM »
Perhaps time to update the title of this thread to VP? Here’s a non-paywalled link to his WSJ interview published today:

https://archive.is/aALiU

47
Politics & Religion / A Hogg Wild Grift
« on: February 15, 2025, 03:23:35 PM »

48
Politics & Religion / The Looming UK Civil War & Other Thoughts
« on: February 15, 2025, 03:12:58 PM »
A sweeping piece carrying that covers a lot of ground, For my money the sections on the coming UK civil war and a pre-VP candidate Vance conversation are well worth reading, and the rest is thought provoking at minimum:

https://roddreher.substack.com/p/jd-vance-in-munich-a-lesson-to-elites?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true

49
This is an excerpt from a piece that in my estimation spent too much time explaining a metaphor, albeit one that appears to be ultimately accurate and appears to be coming to pass:

I’ve referred to this controlled siloing process as the Deep State Archipelago, and I see the systematic cutting off of communications and controls from one vector of Deep State power projection to another as one of the key ways in which patriots have prepped the battlespace over the last eight years in preparation for the final hunt … which is now on in full.

In the context of the Deep State, I believe the 2024 election cycle was a Death Blossom, the stage of the game where they began firing blindly (and literally,) revealing themselves and their ultimate aims to the people in a last desperate bid to be rid of Trump and the movement he represents: that's us.

In so doing, they revealed themselves as the collectivist beast we've drawn them as for years.

Death Blossoms are dangerous, but ultimately, they can be weathered.

Death Spirals are different. Decidedly so, and I think we're seeing the Deep State transition from the former to the latter as Trump makes good on his promises, and as the people seize the mass psychological momentum inherent in him doing so.

Put another way, I believe the Deep State is caught in a horror movie of their own making, and I believe they’re starting to realize it.

They are caught in a self-imposed Death Spiral in the place of a former Death Blossom—after all, we were told long ago that ammunition spent was ultimately finite, were we not?—wherein their public attempts to resist the Common Sense deployments of the Golden Age agenda are accelerating the very actualization of that agenda.

Consider the fact that the American public is seeing the System panic at the very prospect of transparency, before we even peek behind the curtain.

This is an untenable position for them to occupy on both an Actual and Narrative level.

On an Actual level, public resistance to Trump’s agenda is triggering a series of legal and constitutional challenges that are and will result in the very precedent setting we’ve been calling for for years, with Trump’s Supreme Court acting as both the ultimate backstop and change engine to codify the long-term transformation of a system that lords over the people to one that once more serves us.

That said, it’s in the narrative where the Establishment truly finds themselves on the back foot, and I believe their public panic pattern is indicative both of their obvious fear at the ultimate endgame of this era and the fact that they know this change process can happen very slowly, and then all at once.

To wit, when we look at the recent targeting and exposure of USAID by the DOGE—the first of MANY exposures to come—it’s much more Narrative than Actual.

Yes, the agency and many more like it are being dismantled, and its workforce spit back into the true American economy where they can either swim in the emergent and revitalized free market or sink to scratch a parasitic living off the increasingly precarious welfare state, but the story of that dismantling is following a death spiral pattern akin to those sometimes seen in the animal kingdom, specifically in ant colonies.

https://badlands.substack.com/p/badlands-news-brief-7b8?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true

50
A peak behind the curtain of the GONGO/transgender covert, dark money effort to alter gender narratives and biological imperatives along the way:

The Dark Money Behind the Trans Movement: Investigative Journalist Jennifer Bilek

For the first time in a decade, the seemingly invincible transgender movement is on the run. In the United States, the Trump administration is purging gender ideology from government institutions and issuing a string of executive orders targeting everything from sex change surgeries for minors to LGBT indoctrination in schools. Europe’s medical institutions—in Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and France—are pushing back against “gender affirming care” for minors or banning it entirely. Populists in Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany have caught the mood and are increasingly unequivocal in their condemnations of aspects of gender ideology. Leaders in Hungary and Poland, of course, were ahead of the curve.

To ensure that recent victories and the frequently unstable positions of politicians bending to public opinion are permanent, it is essential to understand the key sources of the transgender movement’s power.

One of those sources, surprisingly, has been consistently ignored not only by mainstream journalists—who have been selling the fiction that the transgender industry is a grassroots powerhouse rather than establishment astroturf—but also missed by most opponents of gender ideology: Donor cash. Jennifer Bilek, an investigative journalist who has been tirelessly following the money for years, stands out as one of the few reporters who provides a unique context for the rise of gender ideology. Any understanding of this “movement” is, in my view, incomplete without reference to her work.

Much of her investigative research is detailed in a bombshell book published in 2024, Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches from The 11th Hour. At this key moment in the fight against gender ideology, Jennifer Bilek detailed her discoveries for europeanconservative.com.

During the first few weeks of his administration, Donald Trump has launched a full-scale attack on LGBT ideology. Your journalism has revealed the extent to which the transgender industry has been bankrolled by incredibly wealthy donors who have poured huge amounts of cash into this industry. Who are these donors, and what kind of financial clout do they wield?

In my reporting, I have focused on a handful of billionaires, bankrolling the institutionalization of gender ideology.

Tim Gill, a gay man living in Colorado, and Jon Stryker, a gay man living in Michigan, feature prominently in my work. In 1994, Tim Gill, the founder of Quark, Inc., a computer software corporation, sold his company and used the money to create the Gill Foundation, the largest LGBTQI+ NGO in America. Gill is friends with Jon Stryker, who founded the second most significant LGBTQI+ NGO in 2020, leaving his position as founding board member at Greenleaf Trust, a wealth management firm.

 Together, Stryker and Gill have poured over a billion dollars into LGBTQI+ rights. Jon Stryker founded the Arcus Foundation after the AIDS epidemic was quelled in America, and after gay marriage was legalized.

Simultaneously, Gill and Stryker set their sights on support for a new constituency: Transvestic fetishists, who adopted female attire and mannerisms for erotic arousal, and transsexuals who appropriated female sex characteristics with medical technology, as new sexual minorities needing human rights protections. Gender identity was added to their LGB acronym, adopting the term ‘transgender’ for a fetish of adult men.

The Pritzker family is one of the richest families in America and features very prominently in the funding and institutionalization of gender ideology. Jennifer (James) Pritzker, once a family man and a decorated member of the armed forces, now claims to be a woman. He has made gender ideology a high note in his philanthropic funding through his Tawani Foundation, a philanthropic organization with grants focusing on Gender and Human Sexuality. His Tawani Foundation partners with Squadron Capital, an acquisitions corporation, with a focus on medical technology, medical devices, and orthopedic implants.

He has funded WPATH (an activist organization promoting hormones and surgery as “treatment”), Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and gender clinics for children. JB Pritzker is James’ cousin and the governor of Illinois. He is co-founder of the Pritzker Group, a private investment firm that invests in digital technology and medical companies, including Clinical Innovations, which has a global presence. JB Pritzker has initiated grade school curriculums for his state which teach children they can ‘transcend their sex’ with medical technology and has recently made Illinois a sanctuary state for children claiming a different sex.

His sister Penny Pritzker served on President Obama’s Council for Jobs and Competitiveness and Economic Recovery Advisory Board. She was national co-chair of Obama for America 2012 and national finance chair of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. To say she was influential in getting President Obama elected would be an understatement. Obama made “transgenderism” a pet issue of his administration, holding a meeting at the White House (the first ever) to highlight advancements for so-called ‘transgender’ people.

The administration quietly applied the power of the executive branch to make it easier for people adopting various sex identities to alter their passports, get cross-sex treatment at Veteran’s Administration facilities, and access public school restrooms and sports programs based on gender identity. These are just a few of the ‘transgender’-specific policy shifts of Obama’s presidency.

Together with the rest of the family they have funded millions of dollars to many universities across America, and at least one in Canada, conspicuously, many with gender clinics. All these funders fund other LGBTQI+ organizations, law centers, media, and other organizations that drive the ideology into the culture.

There are many other funders, but since the network is immense, I try to get people to focus on some key philanthropists and oligarchs, so they understand what is happening. George Soros’ Open Society Foundation created a legal guide for “transgender” children. Warren and Peter Buffet have gifted millions to the LGBTQI+, and Joan and Irwin Jacobs, two longtime ACLU supporters whose estimated worth in 2017 was $1.23 billion, also have heavy investments in LGBTQI+.

Jeff Bezos, and Marc Benioff of Salesforce, have funded enormous sums of money to gender clinics, and have investments in the technological reproduction sector. David Bohnett, another wealthy gay man, funneled a whopping $32 million into creating The Bohnett Foundation, funding LGBTQI+ activism, after selling his social network company GeoCities to Yahoo. There are also many international law firms, corporations, and money management and technology firms pumping millions of dollars into, and otherwise supporting, the indoctrination of society with gender ideology.

These funders often go through anonymous funding organizations such as Tides Foundation, founded and operated by Drummond Pike, another gay man invested in LGBTQI+ rights. Large corporations, philanthropists, and organizations can send enormous sums of money to the Tides Foundation, specify the direction the funds are to go, and have the funds get to their destination anonymously. Tides Foundation creates a legal firewall and tax shelter for foundations and funds political campaigns, often using legally dubious tactics.

Soros and Gill are two major gender industry funders who generated millions of dollars to get Obama elected, and Stryker was one of the top five contributors to Obama’s campaign. Under Obama and President George W. Bush, the federal government also funded the Tides Foundation with $82.7 million, which in turn donated $47.2 million to LGBTQ issues over the last two decades.

Gender ideology took root in nearly every major Western institution almost overnight, from political parties to medical institutions, from academia to the education system. How did mere cash—even the numbers your journalism references—manage to pull this off?

It wasn’t cash alone that helped institutionalize the ideology, but stealth and strategic planning, construction of organizations that would tackle spreading the ideology through the media, like GLAAD Foundation, the world’s largest LGBTQI+ media advocacy organization, and the GLSEN Foundation, touted as an anti-bullying platform for LGBTQI+ in schools, indoctrinates school boards, students, and teachers to gender ideology.

The Victory Institute is another NGO, which finds potential political candidates who identify as LGBTQI+ and trains them for positions within the political arena to change policies that support the ideology. Both Rachel Levine and Sarah McBride, two men who are claiming womanhood, were groomed for and inserted into positions of power in the government.

There are myriad other NGOs that are working in synchronicity to drive policy changes, along with corporate and institutional adherence to gender ideology. Partnership for Global LGBTQI + Equality was launched by the Biden administration in 2019. In collaboration with the World Economic Forum, it convened a group of companies working behind the scenes to push LGBTQI+ policy in business practices. Suddenly there emerged ‘transgender’ organizations to drive body dissociation as another way to be human and de-pathologize it in law.

Out Leadership is the business networking arm of the LGBTQI+, where those in the higher echelons of the LGBTQI+ political apparatus meet with others in the business communities to cross-market gender ideology. Out Leadership boasts a marketing constituency of $4.7 trillion, which they use as a cudgel to get other businesses in line with this ideology.

So, this operation to disseminate an ideology that attempts to convince the human population that sex can be transcended is highly organized by many people in power. The real grift, though, was tying this ideology to human rights. This was the ingredient that cast a spell on most of the population. That, and adding children to the mix. Rebranding transsexualism, a fetish of adult men, to ‘transgender,’ allowed for the corporately constructed transgender child, which no one had heard of prior to 2000. In the span of two decades, they were everywhere, and they needed our support.

Over the past several years, the transgender movement has finally begun to receive more scrutiny. The medicalization of minors with gender dysphoria, the extent to which ‘transgenderism’ is a social contagion, the indoctrination of students, and other aspects have received comprehensive coverage, albeit not in the mainstream press. But the role of billionaires willing to spend enormous amounts of money that you detail has largely been ignored. Why do you think that is?

People have told me they find the conversation about money to be too complicated, that it is difficult for others to understand or believe. This is silly when you think about it. Everyone understands the language of money, as is being seen all over social media, with President Trump’s DOGE department exposures. It is probably more universal at this point than music. I think focusing on the vast sums of money going into this is more terrifying in its implications than focusing on one issue, and this is what accounts for many people’s resistance.

When you understand the breadth of the organization and money that has gone into this agenda, it can leave you with a sense of despair in attempting to stop it. I believe we cannot possibly stop what we cannot understand, or refuse to examine more thoroughly, but I grant that it can be daunting. I think the refusal to bring the money into established campaigns of resistance has slowed things down enormously and unnecessarily.

There is also the issue of wanting to be kind or at least show yourself to be kind to people who are indoctrinated with the ideology. A huge mistake was buying into the concept that there is anything coherent about the term ‘transgender,’ or the ideology that goes with it. Now, two decades on, we are still discussing ‘transgender’ people as if this is something real.

 Another mistake, in my opinion, was framing this as a feminist issue. Though I have spent a good chunk of my adult life campaigning for women’s rights, framing this as a feminist issue sets people who are against gender ideology, but who don’t agree with feminist analysis, against each other. Assaulting healthy human reproduction systems and injuring people, is a crime against humanity, not just women.

There have been several significant victories against gender ideology in several Western countries: The UK’s Cass Review and resulting ban on puberty blockers for minors, the Trump administration’s executive orders, and a rejection of so-called “gender-affirming care” by several other European countries, for example. How, in your view, will the funders of the transgender industry attempt to navigate these new challenges, and what are opponents of gender ideology missing in their strategies?

From my perspective, there is nothing those driving this ideology have not thought of in terms of setbacks, so though I am thrilled with the executive orders Trump has signed against this ideology, I am extremely cautious about calling this the end of the madness. The attack on children’s healthy reproductive systems was obviously insane and was bound to be rolled back eventually. However, what has not been rolled back at all are these macabre surgeries and experiments on the healthy reproductive systems of people over 18 years, and the idea that this is healthcare.

The nonsense of ‘gender dysphoria’ has not been rolled back, and the idea of a ‘transgender’ person is more solidified than ever. The concept of a ‘transgender’ person normalized within the culture, our institutions—and more dangerously, the market—has already proved to be a huge success, and quite possibly was the goal all along. The men with this fetish of deconstructing womanhood for their erotic pleasure, are now walking the halls of power, miming womanhood, and speaking not only for women, but as women. A very dangerous precedent has been set with the development of ‘reasonable transsexuals,’ which seem to be on the rise if you follow this issue on social media. The ‘reasonable transsexuals’ in positions of power are there to change policy.

The one hundred top-earning international law firms all have LGBTQI+ platforms of support for this ideology and they are already preparing for battle against Trump’s executive orders. They knew this was coming.

How can politicians and activists fight the influence of these donors to ensure that long-lasting, consequential victories against the transgender industry can be achieved in the years ahead?

When you have an ideology that denies reality forced on the public, into all our institutions, the law, and social spaces by the most powerful, monied people in the world, with obvious and detailed organization, this is not a social contagion. It is social engineering. To keep insisting it is a social contagion, leaves it floating around in space, doing its damage by osmosis, and removed from the organized power that is generating it. Politicians and activists must confront power, and why this is happening.

I think we have been offered a small window of opportunity with Trump’s election, because financial corruption at the highest levels of government and society are being exposed. It forces people to stop and think in terms of business instead of fighting with each other over who started what in terms of ideology. Money and business are, unfortunately, the universal language. If we can see what is happening, we have half a chance of resisting it. If we don’t take this opportunity to push hard against this ideology, I shudder to think where we will be in a decade from now.

https://europeanconservative.com/articles/interviews/the-dark-money-behind-the-trans-movement-investigative-journalist-jennifer-bilek/

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