If true, Mike Benz takes the Harvard situation to a different level of activity. 11 min video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYFzusy3Or8
(Note:
Benz discusses Harvard’s role in the globalist looting of the former Soviet Union.
photog)
Tag: Drain the Swamp
Trump and Rubio Are Gutting the Deep State
Trump administration places dozens of National Security Council officials on leave.
Now that’s the way to do it. Wholesale.
“The moves will cut the agency’s 350-member staff roughly in half. “The NSC is the ultimate Deep State. It’s Marco vs. the Deep State. We’re gutting the Deep State,” a White House official said in an Axios report, which the Washington Examiner confirmed with the White House.”
Think of all these Harvard graduates suddenly cut loose from their lucrative, powerful sinecures. No fat salary, no clout with defense contractors, no free lunches as four star restaurants!
“Politico reported that committees and their meetings will be reduced and that the White House reinterviewed a large number of NSC staff members to see whether they should keep their jobs. The outlet also reported that notices went out to staffers late Friday afternoon after a staff meeting, with many out of town for the holiday weekend.”
I’d love to be a fly on the wall during those interviews. “What would you say…you do here??”
Cleaning Out the Augean Stables
When John Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963, I was six years old. I think I was in kindergarten at the time. I remember the day because the nuns were all crying. So, there hasn’t been a day in my life that I can remember that I wasn’t aware of Kennedy’s assassination. And after the initial shock wore off my family members, it receded into my mind until his brother was assassinated a few years later. At that point, talk about conspiracies finally became loud enough and I was old enough to have it impinge on my thoughts.
But I wasn’t receptive to these ideas. I just believed what the official version stated. Lone gunmen were responsible and that was all there was to it.
I was watching a podcast that had a JFK conspiracy advocate on. After the initial obvious question (“Is there a smoking gun in the new document dump?”) was answered with a, “Whoa, whoa! I’m on page 3 of 60,000,” the expert explained that what he’s looking for isn’t a smoking gun but rather a pattern of facts that steers the explanation toward one of the likelier causes.
And here, there is a lot of information that tells us more about what was going on between JFK and his intelligence agencies. And none of it makes the CIA look less guilty. The CIA had been following Oswald around for the four years before the assassination and they knew exactly where he lived and worked and how close he would be to Kennedy that day. And there has never been a doubt that Jack Ruby was a mob-controlled stooge who did what he was told. And there is no doubt that the CIA had connections to the mob and that the mob hated the Kennedys. And JFK had been talking to some of the top staff in his administration about busting up the CIA for what happened in Cuba. This “conspiracy theorist” doesn’t come right out and say that the CIA had Kennedy killed. But that’s what he’s pointing to.
Somehow that still shocks me. Now, looking at what happened to Trump last year in Pennsylvania should make it seem obvious that the Deep State is completely ruthless and unconcerned with consequences. But as intellectually simple as that situation is to see, it’s still horrifying to me. Sure, I’ve known for decades now that our government isn’t the white hat good guys that I thought they were when I was younger. Iraq taught me that politicians of both parties use Americans as pawns whenever it’s convenient. We have psychopaths running many of our agencies. Just look at the FBI and the Justice Department. Guilt and innocence are the least important aspects of people they target for “justice.”
But the shock tells me that probably the most important work Donald Trump can do before he retires to Mar a Lago in three and half years is to empty out the CIA and the FBI. I think of these two agencies as threats a hundred times more dangerous to this country than China and Russia combined. We have a very expensive and on balance, formidable military machine. Even after eighty years, the nuclear deterrence of our arsenal is still potent. I don’t think the benefits we gain from the intelligence and judgement of these intelligence agencies compensate us for the malice and deception that they seem to display as their defining characteristics. They are a threat to the elected leaders of this country and they represent a potent force preventing the very information which our leaders need from reaching them. Instead of facts they provide a narrative that is convenient for their interests but often is confusing and destructive. I wish Donald Trump all the best luck in tackling these rogue agencies. And I hope he breaks them permanently.
Well, that’s what I thought about today.
Give It Your Best Shot
I heard that Trump wants to eliminate federal income tax for anyone earning less than $150,000. Now isn’t that remarkable. I can’t pretend that I know how that would impact the federal budget and debt but I’m pretty sure it will make him, at least in the short run, the most popular president in the last two hundred years.
I think this will raise several questions. Will this force state income taxes to triple? How will this impact the income taxes of people earning $150,000 to $300,000? Will my social security and healthcare benefits be paid to me in monopoly money?
But all kidding aside, I know that Trump is considering many radical changes to the tax code. A while ago I heard he was thinking about replacing income taxes with a federal sales tax increase. Is this part of the same plan? Between these ideas and the tariff stuff and the DOGE initiative to cut back the size and cost of the federal government we seem to be looking at a re-invention of government. Or maybe it would be fair to call it a recalibration. We all know the cost of government is out of whack and that we can’t possibly sustain the service on the debt indefinitely. As it is now it’s something like $600 billion. That’s insane. What it means is that what Trump is doing isn’t revolutionary madness to the body politic. He’s applying a tourniquet before the patient bleeds out.
But there’s no guarantee all of this will succeed. The American voters are fickle and they have no patience. Unless Trump gets most of his program in place in the next year, the mid-terms will be upon him and he will lose the ability to get legislation through Congress. So, he’s threading a needle.
But these are exciting times. People have awakened from a decades-long-dream to find their government is a malignant force that threatens their lives and livelihood. And their only hope is a crazy man like Donald Trump. Well, at least it’s not boring. It’s more like a three-ring circus. We’ve got wars and tariffs in the first ring. We’ve got DOGE and the Swamp in the second ring. And in the third ring we have crime and the illegal aliens. And Trump is the circus master in the top hat, tails, boots and whip trying to keep the whole circus moving at top speed like an infernal calliope-carousel steam engine. And hoping that the whole thing doesn’t fly apart in all directions.
I will say I am guardedly hopeful. Just seeing how much can be done when an energetic and fearless approach is taken, provides encouragement that I can’t remember feeling since Ronald Reagan told us in 1981 that the Carter malaise was over and it was morning in America again. So maybe it will fail and the whole thing will fall apart and the bad guys will be back in power afterward.
But what have I got to lose by rooting for Team Trump? Can I be any more blacklisted than I already have been? Will it matter if they tax me any higher if the money is already becoming worthless? Can they possibly know any more of my words, deeds or thoughts than they already do?
No! I have nothing to lose by betting on Trump. Go for it, Donald. Give it your best shot.
Tom’s World – 23FEB2025 – Gold Bricks Off the Titanic
Remember 4 and a fraction years ago during the BLM riots when there were entire city blocks filled with parked charter busses just around the corner from the riot site?
Also, there were Craig’s List recruiting ads for paid “rioters”. Somehow, nobody bird dogged the lead back to the source, not publically anyway. I’ll bet you that the ultimate money source was US.gov very possibly through USAID and a couple of cutout NGO’s.
…
The analogy used by a senior EPA employee recently was, “throwing gold bricks off the stern on the Titanic”.
Even now, I suspect that if we ever learn the true scale of the corruption, we will be stunned, at least initially. After the initial shock, I think there would then be some public hangings.
So Joe Biden sold his office of the Vice Presidency for somewhere in the $30 million range?
What a small time piker.
…
($4.7 trillion)
“That’s supervillain scale theft.” I don’t think there is even a word for corruption on that scale because the word has never been needed before.
No Signs of Winning Fatigue Yet
So, as I was describing it recently, I needed a crisis in my novel to provide some excitement. I have a faction of the “good guys” go rogue and decide to take over Cheyenne and declare Wyoming a sovereign nation. Some National Guard troops are called in to defend the State Capitol building. The rebels surround them and then National Guard reinforcements with heavier weapons encircle the rebels. Now, I want my protagonist to intercede and defuse the situation. But how does he get in and how does he convince them? Getting in is easy. The siege circles are rudimentary positions within a city so a speeding bullet-proof vehicle is enough to make it plausible and an RPG or two chasing him will make it colorful.
But what can he possibly say to heavily armed mutineers who have lost friends and family and want to lash out at the federal government? Now that’s the hard part. I’ve been working something up. Part of it will play on the fact that many of the rebels were soldiers who served in Iraq like the protagonist. But that only gets me so far. The hero is a plain-spoken man so I have to be careful that the words don’t come off too polished and that the persuasion fits the mindset of his audience. Well, to be continued.
So now Kash Patel is not only the FBI Director but also the temporary head of ATF. Temporary sounds interesting. I wonder if Trump’s thinking of abolishing the ATF and passing along whatever functions he deems useful to another department, maybe the DOJ. And I was amused to hear that Trump wants to visit Fort Knox to see if the gold is really there. I wonder if he’ll try scraping it with a knife to make sure it’s not just lead covered in gold paint. We’re definitely getting our money’s worth with Trump.
Now one thing I have been thinking about the last few days is exactly what happens to the economy if Trump does manage to cancel a trillion or more dollars from the federal budget. That is a lot of money. First of all, the unemployment rate will increase somewhat by the number of fired bureaucrats. And a trillion dollars removed from the federal budget will decrease to some extent business activity. Could it cause a mild recession? Maybe. But the truth is that might be exactly what’s needed to tamp down inflation. And if we are to have recession then the earlier in Trump’s term it happens the better. And if it is short and mild then the drop in inflation will more than counterbalance the bad news with good. After all, these unemployed are not factory or corporate employees. They’re bureaucrats that don’t really add to the GDP in a meaningful way. They’re more like parasites. Well, we’re sure to hear from the press how bad it is for the economy to lay off bureaucrats. It’s almost as bad as laying off reporters and talking heads.
And speaking of the media, I’ve noticed that some of the left media shills are starting to wake up again. They’re trumpeting that all the DOGE activity has angered the American people and like a sleeping giant they are awakening and demanding that USAID be allowed to waste the billions of dollars that Joe Biden earmarked for them. Oh, well played. Yes, the American people are incredibly strong advocates for voluntary medical male circumcision in Mozambique or mental health support for Venezuelan LGBTQ+ youth or “Safe Mobility Offices” for migrants in Latin America. People are crying out to protect these critically important programs and the bureaucrats employed to spend these funds.
But the top news in the last few days are the various environmental slush funds that Joe Biden squirreled away just as he left office. Ten billion dollars deposited in a commercial bank account for theft at a later date and two billion dollars in a PAC overseen by that legendary champion of environmental stewardship Stacey Abrams. Now that’s world class robbery.
So, the hits keep coming and most conservatives say they’re not tired of winning yet. Good.
Tom’s World – 22FEB2025 – DOGE, Blessed Be Their Name
I think it amusing/horrifying that the DIMs have finally identified their base principle, their hill to die on that MUST NOT be breached. DOGE has revealed the nature of that principle. And it is not DIE, open borders, green energy, climate change, transgender, etc., etc.
The hill that that they have chosen as the location for their apoplectic battle is the continuation of graft and corruption on the $trillion dollar scale.
Example from yesterdays news- Though it’s difficult, I’ll try not to get too pejorative here but that FAT ***** Black Georgia “woman”,Stacey Abrams, was in the news. DOGE (blessed be their name) uncovered that a PAC formed by Stacey a couple of months ago for environmental justice received a $2 billion (read $2 thousand million) grant from the nightmare Biden admin.
Understand that this PAC was 2 months old and had no employees and had a capitalization of $100 before the grant. Also understand that the grant had no conditions, no oversite, no monitoring, no auditing.
That precisely is the base principle of what the Dims have become and will “die” to protect.
How Miserable They’ll Be
How much damage can Donald Trump do to the Left in four years’ time? Well, a normal Republican president spends his four years basically trying to hold his own against the Deep State while all the Democrat cabinet officers take a four-year hiatus working in well-funded NGOs and cushy media jobs. And when the Democrats get back into the White House, they’ve had four years to map out the next wave of progressive boondoggles.
But Donald Trump is not your father’s Republican. He’s taking a wrecking ball to the US federal budget and firing everyone in sight. And as for those well-funded NGOs, well he’s defunding them. USAID was the first place Elon Musk went with DOGE. All those government funded think tanks and color revolution incubators are going to dry up without the millions and billions of dollars of federal slush money to fund their depravity. And even a bunch of left-wing “media” sites are going to be feeling the pinch without federal dollars.
And this time around even the mainstream media is hurting badly. CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Politico and many others are laying off journalists and reporters by the hundred. There probably won’t be any spots opening up for unemployed CIA, FBI, NSA and other directors on their staffs and even less place for all the generals and colonels about to find themselves pounding the pavement.
And the same goes for lobbying jobs for defense contractors, banks, green energy scammers and pharma companies. The SEC and the FDA are going to crack down on the shenanigans, the green energy gravy train will be shut down and the DOD is going to be cancelling multi-billion-dollar weapons system contracts instead of starting new ones.
Put all that together and it spells disaster for the Left’s recession-proof game plan. In fact, it also spells disaster for Washington DC in general. Guess what happens to the national capitol if hundreds of thousands of jobs are cut and a trillion dollars is pulled out of the budget?
RECESSION!
Now, what would that look like? It would mean the laid-off bureaucrats would disperse across the country like cockroaches looking for jobs they were qualified for. But that’s the problem. They’re really not qualified for anything useful. They’re federal bureaucrats. They have no skills and they’re used to being unaccountable to management. No one would or could hire them. Their resumes are radioactive and they have the mark of Cain on their foreheads. Chances are they’ll end up in fast food or prostitution.
At the same time a reduction in the number of workers in DC will take its toll on the local businesses that support them; restaurants, clothes stores and gay bathhouses. Just as the rest of the country will be benefiting from an economic upturn, the Greater Washington area will be plunged into economic stagnation. Property values will plummet and crime will spiral out of control. Knowing President Trump’s penchant for quick decisive action, I predict he will move his team to a new capitol at Mar-a-Lago and let the old capitol sink back into the swamp where it came from.
But seriously, we’re about to get a four-year vacation from IRS audits, antifa and BLM rioting, foreign wars, LGBTQ innovations (pronouns, rainbow paraphernalia, etc.), mask-wearing bureaucrats and runaway energy prices. Four years of peace and quiet without the Left stirring up trouble will be like heaven itself. Sure, I’m exaggerating how perfect the relief will be but still it’s going to be plenty good. And one of the best things about it will be how miserable they’ll be.
How can you beat that?
That Would Be Great
In the Hollywood film, “The Bad and the Beautiful” there is a discussion between an actor named Gaucho and a bit-part actress on the make named Lila. Gaucho tells her that his producer friend Jonathan (Kirk Douglas’s character) is a great man. But world-weary Lila laughs and replies “There are no great men, buster, there’s only men.”
So, are there any great men? Were there ever any? Is a Caesar or a Napoleon great? Or were they just great generals. Was Einstein great or was he merely a genius? Was Socrates a great man or merely annoying? How about St Paul?
It seems to me that the definition of a great man is one who is both intelligent and moral. So, it’s not enough to be brilliant if the use of your intelligence is to do evil. And it’s not enough to be a saint if you cannot somehow use this moral sense to benefit humanity as a whole or at least a significant chunk of it.
Framed the way I have here it’s not that easy to pick out these exceptional beings. I guess religious leaders like Jesus, Buddha, Moses stand out. They’ve had an outsized impact on the world. They understood the problem of living in the world of men. It’s so very hard to know what is the right thing to do in the multitude of decisions we make as we negotiate the confusing and frightening human world. How often we choose the easier thing instead of the “right” choice. We compromise our morals and standards to avoid pain or discomfort or even embarrassment. How much more will a leader compromise because the stakes are just so incredibly high.
I guess the only leader that comes to mind is Marcus Aurelius; the philosopher king. Not that he was perfect or that none of his philosophy was misguided. But without a doubt he was intelligent and he used his powerful office to provide the best government he could to the millions who lived within the Roman empire in the second century AD. Maybe this is an example of a great man.
So which Americans were great? Washington, Jefferson? Maybe. In the last one hundred and fifty years I don’t think there’s been much greatness. FDR had a large impact on the country but I don’t think he was wise. And so many of our recent presidents are neither moral nor wise. Some were truly awful, like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and especially Joe Biden.
So where does that leave Donald Trump? Well, morality is not his forte. His private life is a mess. You need look no further than the “Stormy Daniels” episode to see that he does not restrain his baser nature at all. Then again do any of the wealthy ever do better? As for intelligence, he’s not a stupid man. He is an ambitious businessman who knows how to market himself. Is he wise? Well, he’s no philosopher king. But I think he does feel affection for his countrymen. I think he does want to make America a better place and make life better for Americans.
So, let’s just say that if he succeeds, Donald Trump will perform a truly great service for the United States of America. He will save it from the forces that are currently destroying it. He can vanquish the managerial bureaucracy that rules over us and is leeching away our strength and vitality. He will succeed where a century of American presidents has failed to save their country. That would be great.
Rebuild the Middle Class
In the comments to yesterday’s post was this one by TomD:
“For a number of years, I saw leftism coming and attributed it to a politically motivated elite with a brilliantly executed long focus political motive. There’s probably at least some of that but the revelations of last few weeks lead me to think that what we have been observing with such dismay over the past decade or so is coming from a much baser motivation: greed.
The revelations coming from DOGE seem to imply a very large and intricate network of NGO’s lavishly endowed from scantily controlled government disbursement programs. Apparently, the amount of money disappearing into these dark and uncontrolled conduits is well into the $trillions.
Everybody close to government is getting RICH and they do not want the trails to become illuminated.”
I think a lot of us who were just plain old patriotic Americans, or what they now call civic nationalists, assumed that the Left really was sincere with all the craziness they preached and that the waste and inefficiency were symptoms of their myopia and unwillingness to use meritocratic selection when populating the federal government with useless people of all imaginable types.
But just like TomD I’ve finally gotten it through my thick skull that for the most part all these people in government are just plain crooks stealing us blind. And I include almost all the Republicans in that category too. All they want is a way to cash in on their positions in the machine that prints money and hands it out to those in the know.
I suppose that I should be philosophical about all this. After all, greed is what makes capitalism work supposedly. And I suppose if they were just wetting their beaks but still doing their jobs to keep this country healthy, rich and strong I’d be inclined to say, “Well, that’s just human nature. They’re just good old boys picking up some crumbs from the floor of the bakery.”
But it’s nothing like that. They’re like Mitt Romney’s company Bain Capital. They’re selling off the assets of a company (America) and sending the employees home without jobs and without their pensions. They’re liquidators. It’s a giant going out of business sale with us as the former employees forced to take temporary employment, boxing up the equipment as it’s shipped off to China and elsewhere.
But for as long as the Merry Go Round keeps turning, they get paid by skimming off of the proceeds from the sales of what’s still left.
Eventually, our bodies will be all that’s left. And the only use for those will be as cannon fodder for the forever wars that still bring in value to the people running the show. And that’s why Ukraine and the Middle East and Taiwan are always in the news and why we still have to hear about how important democracy is. They need our sons to suit up and fly to the desert and die in the heat.
And that’s why we should hate these people with all the hate we can manufacture. To them we’re cattle and that’s all. They feel not the least kinship toward us and we should not have the least compunction about them failing, losing their jobs or anything else. Hearing about how NGOs are laying off people means less than nothing to me. In fact, I’m overjoyed to hear about some Harvard graduate who was making mid-six figures working for a George Soros “open society” NGO shocked and dismayed to be out of work and stuck with a huge mortgage on a five-million-dollar house in Northern Virginia.
Compare his plight to a family that’s been living for the last two hundred years in Ohio or Pennsylvania while the industries that were located there systematically relocated to China and left the working class more and more desperate and poor. Trump has looked at what is going on and clearly seen the liquidation game for what it is. If the rest of his team are smart, they’ll see that their only hope (and ours) is to continue this process to force the corporations to invest in us. To quote a mythical small town American, “this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?”
Call it populism, nationalism, whatever -ism you care to. This used to be a great nation. A balance has to be struck that allows for a prosperous middle class. Instead, the masters of the universe think they can settle into a feudal system with them at the top and us as the serfs. I think it’s time we let them know that if this is going to be feudalism then we might as well bring the time up to the French Revolution and make a big old bonfire out of their cool stuff.
Enough is enough. Empty out Washington, slash the federal budget, lower our taxes, stand pat on the nuclear arsenal, fix all the broke stuff, bring back our jobs, fill up the prisons and rebuild the middle class.