SO FAR, INDEED:
This USAID could be the single greatest government corruption story so far.
Fixed it for you.
— John Ringo SF Author (@Jringo1508) February 6, 2025
Archive for 2025
February 5, 2025
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Donald Trump, libertarian president?
OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.
FASTER, PLEASE: The American Brezhnev era is over.
Since 9/11, Washington has spent billions of dollars promoting “democratic norms” abroad. The policy mirrored the late Soviet Union’s attempts to promote communism in countries outside Moscow’s direct control, as witnessed under the leadership Leonid Brezhnev. And now at last it appears to have ended, following Donald Trump’s executive orders and yesterday’s State Department takeover of the United States Agency for International Development.
This American Brezhnev policy has had a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland effect: democratically elected leaders such as Ukraine’s ill-fated Viktor Yanukovych could be violently overthrown in the name of democracy. Over the past quarter century, countries such as Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia and Romania, have at one time or another been deemed insufficiently “democratic” (i.e. insufficiently in thrall to the dictates of Washington) and thus found themselves the target of sanctions and none-too-subtle propaganda campaigns. Under Joe Biden, such efforts were redoubled as “protecting democracy” became the leitmotif of American strategy at home and abroad.
Brezhnev 2.0 would not be possible without the scores of “independent media” outlets that receive funding from agencies such as USAID or from the constellation of “non-governmental organizations,” or NGOs, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. NED’s first president, Allen Weinstein, famously bragged that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.” Now Donald Trump has frozen all manner of foreign assistance. And by defunding media projects, Trump has deprived Washington’s empire builders and their disciples of a crucial weapon in their project of overthrowing regimes deemed insufficiently pliable.
Trump’s funding freeze is one of those rare occasions when the prerogatives of the national security state are actually being challenged. As expected, the media is going bananas—after all, in the US, the priorities of the media and the national security state are often one and the same. Doubt it? Consider the current smear campaign aimed at former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard conducted by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, the New York Times editorial board and Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.
If American media outlets can be relied on to tee up the propaganda at home, government-and NGO- funded media outlets carry Washington’s water abroad. Allegedly independent media outlets such as CivilNet in Armenia, New Voice of Ukraine, the Kyiv Post and Magyar Hang in Hungary exist not because of domestic demand, but because they serve Washington’s political agenda.
Last year, both VDH and Niall Ferguson discussed DC being trapped in the Brezhnev era. At the moment, particularly given the breakneak speed at which the Trump administration is moving, it appears to be Morning in America again, to coin a phrase. And speaking of which!
This is also highly reminiscent of when Reagan himself replaced the portrait of Thomas Jefferson with Calvin Coolidge in the Cabinet Room on the very first day of his administration, as symbolism that there wasn’t just a new sheriff in town, he had a very different worldview than those — of both parties — who held the office for the previous half century.
LEE SMITH: The End of ‘Palestine.’
Yesterday, President Donald Trump single-handedly collapsed the most destructive idea of the last hundred years—Palestine. During meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, Trump said he was going to move 1.7 million Palestinians out of Gaza. And just like that, he broke the long spell that had captured generations of world leaders, peace activists, and Middle East terror masters alike, who had paradoxically come to regard the repeated failure and haunting secondary consequences of the idea of joint Arab Muslim and Jewish statehood in the same small piece of land as proof of its necessity.
Palestine was a misshapen idea from the beginning, engendered by an act of pure negation. The Arabs could have gone along with the U.N.’s partition plan like the Jews did, and chosen to build whatever version of Switzerland or Belgium on the eastern Med in 1948. Instead, they resoundingly chose war. That’s the storied “Nakba” at the core of the Palestinian legend—the catastrophe that drove the Arabs from their land and hung a key around the neck of a nation waiting to go home. The Arabs chose the catastrophe; they chose war, based on the premise that they would inevitably win and exterminate the Jews.
Yet despite repeated military failures, and the increasing distance between the first-world powerhouse that the Israelis built and their increasingly war-torn, third-world neighborhood, the global conscience was always predisposed to rebuilding what the Palestinians destroyed. Accordingly, the Palestinian Arabs became a tribe of feral children whose identity was carved out of the relentless vow to eliminate Israel and slaughter the Jews en masse—despite repeated failures, each one more crushing than the last.
Trump said, enough, we’re not rebuilding Gaza. Time for a new idea—the Gazans have to to go, they can try to start again somewhere else, in a land where every building still standing isn’t already wired to explode.
I’m curious to see how Trump’s seemingly off the cuff remark plays out, but as Scott Adams notes:
JIM TREACHER: Biden’s State Dept. Gave $25K to Ecuadorian Drag Queens.
I absolutely love the reaction to all these revelations of ridiculously wasteful spending. The Biden administration was utterly corrupt. Grandpa Joe has dementia, so the neighborhood kids were running around the house after nabbing the keys to the liquor cabinet.
Now Americans are finally learning how badly their hard-earned money has been wasted, and they’re justifiably pissed off at their self-appointed betters. That includes my favorite government agency of all: the State Department.
Ryan King and Josh Christenson, NY Post:
An LGBTQ group in Ecuador tapped into a $25,000 grant from the Biden State Department to produce a two-day drag workshop intended to promote diversity and inclusion abroad…
Fundacion Dialogo Diverso, a nongovernmental organization that aims to promote democracy and the “LGBTIQ+ population” of the South American country, organized the drag show and published footage of it last July.
The State Department footed some of the bill for the show through its Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration, for which the nonprofit thanked the department.
Why did the Biden administration fund a two-day Ecuadorian drag workshop? Because it wasn’t three days.
And yes, there’s video.
Think of the children, America’s Newspaper of Record reminds us!
MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE FLYERS ARE TREATED LIKE CRAP NOWADAYS: Airports Have a Strange Effect on Human Behavior. Here’s Why.
THREAD: Why DOGE went after USAID first.
WELL, YES. MOST OF THE OPPOSITION TO TRUMP AND SUPPORT FOR THE DEMOCRATS TURNS OUT TO HAVE BEEN GOVERNMENT-FUNDED PROPAGANDA AND ASTROTURF: “I don’t know that people are tired of protesting or tired of needing to be upset about one thing or the other out there in the political world every damned day. I think a lot of people who are just keeping quiet actually like what Trump is doing.”
JOHN LUCAS ON LEADERSHIP: “President Trump has now been in office for just over two weeks. Anyone notice a difference yet?
MORE KETCHUP FOR THESE FRIES, PLEASE: New Research Reveals How Lycopene Revitalizes Brain Health and Fights Depression.
ELON, TAKE THE WHEEL: Tesla’s Latest Deal: Let It Drive, Get Cheaper Insurance. In a few years, this deal will be standard with all insurers.
ICYMI: MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Smashing the ‘rice bowls’ — Why elites are lashing out at Trump and Musk’s reforms.
SO EVERYTHING POLITICO HAS PUBLISHED IS NOW SUSPECT:
Remember when Politico leaked the Dobbs decision and conservative Supreme Court justices were almost assassinated?
Turns out that was govt-funded pic.twitter.com/2AfOxy2ZOL
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) February 5, 2025
DOES DATA REPUBLICAN EVER SLEEP?
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I’ve built a powerful tool to help you track nonprofit leadership and follow USAID grant flows with ease.Here’s what you can do:
✅ Search by Principal Officer – Find nonprofits… pic.twitter.com/kr1sHCnRwR— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) February 5, 2025
I’ve been too busy to play around with this new tool but it might be her best yet.
DO NOT TRUST CHINA. CHINA IS ASSHOLE: China-linked firm gets EZ pass contract in New Jersey, former senator calls it ‘worse’ than TikTok.
In September, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority awarded TransCore – owned by Singapore Technologies Engineering, known as ST Engineering – the full authority to run the operation for $1.73 billion, beating out Newark’s Conduent, Inc., whose final offer was $1.479 billion.
* * * * * * * *
Former U.S. Senator Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., who is a consultant to Conduent, said that the situation with a foreign-owned company like TransCore having access to America’s tolling systems is “worse” than the threat from TikTok.
“I don’t really understand why this hasn’t gotten a lot, frankly, a lot more attention,” Torricelli told FOX Business in an interview. “I would rather the Chinese knew what I was watching on TikTok than have the Chinese monitoring my car going up and down the New Jersey Turnpike. I don’t really understand why people aren’t more upset about it.”
The New Jersey Turnpike is one of the busiest highways in the U.S., and is a principal artery between the major cities on the East Coast.
Torricelli warned that every major U.S. government official traveling between New York and Washington, D.C., could potentially have their transportation patterns monitored if TransCore secures the contract to run it. He said that important cargo like chemicals and even U.S. military equipment and movements could be routinely tracked.
“There has to be some national security concern here,” the former senator said. “It is enormously more important than whatever nonsense is going on with TikTok, but it largely has been under the radar.”
Earlier: Chinese-Made Patient Monitor Contains a Secret Backdoor. Along with several other examples of Chinese-made tech with information backdoors.
TIRED OF ALL THE WINNING?
BREAKING: New Jersey's massive lawsuit accusing the oil industry of causing climate change was just dismissed with prejudice.
The case was pursued by the NJ AG, but funded by liberal NGOs. Similar cases in MD and Delaware have also been tossed.
A huge blow for eco activists. pic.twitter.com/Mv044iMLWp
— Thomas Catenacci (@ThomasCatenacci) February 5, 2025
Me neither.
MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS: CIA Employees Get A Buyout Offer. “The staggering speed with which Donald Trump has implemented his agenda has caught progressives flatfooted and without a coherent message. The USAID crisis turned into the Gaza crisis, which is now the CIA crisis, and the week is only halfway over. But as progressives lose their mind again over a voluntary buyout offer that has only been accepted by a small percentage of federal employees, a majority of Americans are increasingly wondering, ‘What’s the big deal?’ Meanwhile, Trump is making tangible progress with reining in federal agencies and uprooting entrenched bureaucrats who oppose his agenda. This is a good thing, especially at the CIA.”
ARMOND WHITE: The Karla or Carlos Controversy Confounds Hollywood.
Instead, the trade press has attacked Gascón for social media posts uncovered by a renegade freelancer, Sarah Hagi, who identifies as a black Muslim and who is Canadian but writes hit-pieces for U.S. media. The trade press has heroized Hagi for exposing dated “racist tweets” by Gascón. Gascón’s posts ranged from criticizing Black Lives Matter and questioning the credibility of the George Floyd scandal to what Hagi claims were endorsements of Adolf Hitler.
So a Muslim in a hijab attacks a trans performer who identifies as a woman yet doesn’t kowtow to all the liberal pieties. It’s an almost humorous fulfillment of the prediction that the Left will eat itself. This is an aberration of progressivism — the flip side of beleaguered social media gadfly Andy Ngo, the independent muckraker who exposes mainstream media’s protection of Antifa. Ngo recently tracked the January 20 killing of a border-patrol agent in Vermont to an alleged violent trans cult.
But the unserious Hollywood trade press remains trivial. Variety went for standard left-Hollywood accusations. Daniel D’Addario wrote a piece on the Gascón affair, with a headline calling Gascón “the Donald Trump of Oscar Season.” D’Addario mentions President Trump nearly as often as he mentions Gascón. A former television critic for Time, D’Addario uses prejudiced phrases — “the politics of prejudice emanating from President Trump,” “our current, entertainment-obsessed president” — even digging-up the Obama birth certificate controversy and the tired comparisons of Trump to Hitler. D’Addario practices code phrases the same way that Gascón’s old tweets, according to Hagi, issued “dog whistles.”
Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and The Wrap betray their own integrity by waging industry vendettas against Gascón and Trump as if both were infidels to the DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity) cause.
What makes this fracas serious is the underlying media mania for cancellation and censorship — of a performer and a president. It’s an extension of the angry zeal that has overtaken the media in general, from legacy publications to the internet upstarts that all mistake partisan activism for journalism. The idea is to effect the revolution in gender and identity that is part of the social transformation progressives demand be installed in our language and thinking. The Academy’s endorsement of Karla or Carlos Gascón has exposed the trade media, transforming it into a medium of spite.
Earlier signs that the entertainment industry trade papers were going far off the rails were in 2022 when they insisted on using The Flash actor Ezra Miller’s “preferred pronouns” to the point where publications such as Variety appeared “More Concerned Over Misgendering Ezra Miller Than His Assaulting Victims,” Brad Slager wrote at Red State:
The ridiculousness begins early, as Variety works hard to address Miller in the proper fashion, and the fractured language that follows delivers this ridiculous diction.
Miller…became a regular at bars in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, where locals came to know and even befriend them. Many recognized Miller from their earliest breakout movies, 2012’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and 2011’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” where they played a troubled teen.
Resorting to the they/them pronoun while describing encounters with a crowd of people leads to obtuse reporting. When it becomes unclear if you are describing the group or the preferred pronoun reference you have veered from your charged duty of providing clear reporting on a matter. It would be more concise to simply use ‘’Miller’’ to designate the actor. But then, there is a possible conflict in using the gendered term actor, so Variety has painted itself into a rainbow corner.
From here, Variety takes the position that this correct pronoun usage is the important way to cover this story. When it comes to interviewing one of the women from Iceland, who had violent encounters with Miller, the corrections to her testimony are glaring and rather offensive. Even as the entertainment outlet affirms the likelihood the woman had no idea about Miller’s pronoun preference, Variety changes her quotes to avoid offending Miller and any potential activist positioning.
“I think it’s just fun and games — but then it wasn’t,” she said. “All of a sudden, [they’re] on top of me, choking me, still screaming in my face if I want to fight. My friend who’s filming sees [they’re] obviously not joking and it’s actually serious, so he stops filming, and pushes [them] off me as [they’re] still trying to fight me. Two guy friends of mine are actually holding [Miller] back as [they’re] screaming, ‘This is what you wanted! This is what you wanted!’” (At the time of the interview, it was unclear whether the woman was aware Miller uses they/them pronouns.)
This decision by Variety echoes a recent piece I covered concerning the BBC and a report that the British outlet delivered about a sexual assault. When a lesbian woman detailed an encounter with a trans woman who was still physically male and ultimately raped her, the BBC took the steps to correct her quotes where she referred to her attacker as him, and “improperly” used the term “his penis.”
These are the inane levels the media is sinking towards where they are fearful of angering a group if they manage to use the wrong pronouns of a violent individual. The willingness to alter the quoted testimony of a victim is journalistically inept, to say nothing of violating the recent narratives we have been spoonfed from this very same journalism complex. Believe all women has now given way to Correct any women who misgender their attacker.
Will next month’s Oscars be a full-on anti-Trump leftist freakout, or does the industry’s attempt to tamp down Gascon’s activism represent an attempt to find the off-ramp? In any case, Ricky Gervais was and is spot-on:
IT’S GRIFT ALL THE WAY DOWN: You’ll Never Believe Who Else Is on the USAID Dole.
CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY:
Kristol tweeted the same thing, albeit slightly more fleshed out, at the start of Trump’s first term as well:
But now we know, thanks to Doge, why the founder of the late, lamented Weekly Standard is in reality such a big government guy:
As Steve wrote on Monday: The Dirty Truth Behind Bill Kristol’s ‘Private’ Funding.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Always Carry Pepper Spray: Conflict can pop up in unexpected places.
THAT GIANT SUCKING SOUND YOU’LL HEAR IS CREDIT TAKEN AWAY FROM MILLIONS OF AMERICANS: Sens. Hawley, Sanders Propose 10% Cap on Credit Card Rates.
Hawley should know better.