SCOTLAND COUNTY, NC: Is a microcosm of the unprecedented impact of Donald Trump post-2020 on the American political structure, according to this perceptive (though far from unflawed) WSJ analysis. Bottom line: How long does it take for Trump’s economic policies to produce down-home impacts.

STIFFENING AMERICA’S SPINE: There is a fundamental connection between the Constitution’s 10th Amendment and the status of individual liberty in America. And the failure of American public education, as described today on Substack by EKO, is a key to understanding why individual liberty is in such peril.

MARTIAL ARTS CHAMP PUT THE PISTOL IN HIS MOUTH: But the firing pin failed and that’s when the U.S. Martial Arts Hall of Fame coach’s life took a radical turn. His name is Jamie Vaughn and his testimony is on HillFaith today.

Dismiss it if you will, but there is an undeniable change in the man’s life. I don’t normally link here on Instapundit these testimonies that appear every Monday on HillFaith, but this one is such a remarkable story that I’m making an exception.

CHRISTIANITY’S DECLINE HAS STOPPED: That’s the message from a massive new survey by Pew. Silicon Valley pioneer investor and Southern Baptist social media influencer Rod Martin digs deep into the Pew data and finds all kind of encouraging indicators of returning health.

MORE TO THAT NSA CULT THAN SEX: The Washington Stand’s Ben Johnson digs into the back story and finds the pro-DEI/pro-Marxist roots of a bunch of now-former Intelligence Community paycheck recipients.

MORE LIGHT ON BIDEN’S BORDER LIES: You probably don’t remember this statement from early in Joe Biden’s Oval Office tenure, but the trouble-makers at Issue & Insights (I&I) certainly do:

“At his first press conference in March 2021 – after claiming that nothing had changed at the border (despite repealing every Trump executive order securing the border on day one) – he said the surge of illegals then underway ‘happens every single solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. It happens every year … happens all the time.’”

It was transparently a lie then and was followed by many more for the next nearly four years. Donald Trump is back in the Oval Office in great part because of Biden’s constant lying about the border and much else. This graph courtesy of I&I makes crystal clear that border invasions like that of the Biden era do not happen “all the time:”

America will be paying the price of Biden’s border lies for years to come, I&I observes.

BILLIONS FOR TERRORISTS, INSULTS FOR MUSK: The contrast between GOP and Democrat members of the House DOGE Subcommittee could not have been more abrupt during yesterday’s hearing on how foreign aid has undermined legitimate U.S. overseas interest.

From the opening statements by Chairman Rep. Marjorie Tayler Greene (R-Ga.) and Ranking Member Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), the pattern was set: A Republican would describe a grant that resulted in U.S. tax dollars going to Hamas or Hezbollah or another of the Islamic terrorist outfits, and a Democrat would follow with variations on “What About Evil Musk?” First it was TDS, now there is MDS.

USAID FUNDING UKRAINE FASHION DESIGN JUNKETS: Yes, you read that correctly. Go here for more details on the secret slush funds Sen. Joni Ernst’s staff investigators found despite more than a year of lies and stalling by USAID officials.

HOUSE DOGE PANEL TO GET SCOOP ON USAID $ TO TERRORIST GROUPS: Gregg Roman of the Middle East Forum will testify tomorrow before Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) DOGE subcommittee with details on how $122 million in USAID funds ended up in the bank accounts of terrorist-linked groups.

TRUMP PUTS FEDS TOP CAREER EXECS ON NOTICE ABOUT PERFORMANCE: The happy days when 80-90 percent of the more than 7,000 members of the career civil service’s Senior Executive Service (SES) could be rated “Outstanding” or “Exceeds Fully Successful” are about to end. Check out my exclusive report today for the Epoch Times.

CAN TRUMP BE PRO DOGE AND EARMARKS BOTH? Little remembered fact about President Donald Trump’s first term: It was then that both political parties in both chambers of Congress reopened the door to earmarks that Sen. Tom “Bridge to Nowhere” Coburn (R-Okla.) killed in 2011.

For whatever reason, Trump did not then make an issue of the return of earmarks, which is particularly surprising now considering the success he’s having with Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

John Hart, CEO of OpenTheBooks, was Coburn’s communications wizard and he wonders in an important Substack column today why killing earmarks for good is nowhere to be seen on the DOGE agenda. Why is it important? Because:

“In the 11 years before the ban was instituted, from 2000 to 2010, Congress spent an average of $20.4 billion per year on earmarks. In the 11 years the ban was in place, from 2011 to 2021, the average dropped to $7.6 billion — a 61 percent decrease,” Hart writes.

“The earmark ban created savings far beyond earmarks. Coburn often argued that ‘earmarks are the gateway drug to Washington’s spending addiction,’ and history proved him right. Getting rid of earmarks helped Congress sober up and reduce overall spending for the first time since the end of the Korean War shortly after the ban went into effect,” he said.

NO, DOGE IS NOT RADICAL: Lydia Mashburn Newman, writing for The Daily Economy, published by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), lays out in terms even a Washington bureaucrat or career Member of Congress can understand on why what the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is no mystery – it’s introducing to the federal bureaucracy what are in the real world widely accepted “best practices.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related thoughts here.

I'm concerned that many people do not understand the historical and institutional context in which the DOGE labor reforms are unfolding. They look at this as if these are some random, chaotic, arbitrary, strange, and even cruel measures to impose on a devoted civil service.…

— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) February 23, 2025

IS CHINA WARNING TRUMP: Three events, beginning with Trump’s decisive November 2024 election triumph, followed by the latest Yale LISTEN study, and the revelation of another Wuhan virus in the making, make sense in such a context. Check out my latest Substack column.

HOW THE LEFT REVERSES ‘ORDO AMORIS:’ There is a traditional Christian doctrine, Ordo Amoris or Ordered Loves, that prioritizes the objects of an individual’s loves. It begins with one’s own family, then one’s neighbors, one’s community, the state, the nation and then those beyond the nation. If you see a parallel in that order with federalism, you’re on target.

But, as Dr. Steve Turley and Rod Martin explore in a well-spent 20 minute video discussion,  the Left has focused a great part of its resources for a century on reversing the traditional Ordo Amoris.

Among the many destructive results they focus on are seen in the growing hate among younger Americans who view this nation as inherently evil from its founding, to say nothing of the insistence that America is obligated to open its borders to all comers and then give them preference over citizens.

TAIBBI HAS A GREAT IDEA: If you aren’t reading Matt Taibbi’s Substack column (ditto Glenn’s on Substack) on a regular basis, you are missing all kinds of important analyses, information, rebuttals and resources. And today, Taibbi offers up a great reference source that has the potential to spark a revolution in digital news tools. Here’s how he describes it:

“This morning, I sent out an article titled: ‘The Library: Timeline of Foreign Censorship Laws.’ It’s neither a news article, nor a finished product. It’s simply a chronological list of primary source documents around the theme of foreign speech laws. Twitter Files and/or FOIA documents may appear in these collections.

“The idea will be to create similar reference homes for emerging news stories: about USAID contracts, the EPA ‘gold bars’ scandal, court challenges to the Trump administration, whistleblower complaints, declassified information about controversies like Covid, and anything else that comes up.

“We’re living through a period of revolutionary change and are awash in revelations and document releases, yet few outlets are making an effort to show core materials. As these stories come out, I’m encouraging readers who work in relevant fields, follow these narratives, or who simply want to pitch in, to write to: , especially if they know of documents that should be added.”

This is an idea that ought to catch on quickly.

WHAT’S THE NEW YORK TIMES’ PROBLEM WITH JEWS? Did you hear about the violent night-time riot against Jewish residents in a Brooklyn neighborhood earlier this week? Not if you depend upon The New York Times for your news. It happened but the editors of the NYT simply ignored the latest eruption of anti-semitic extremism of pro-Hamas/pro-Palestinian radicals.

Richard Pollock explains in his latest Substack column why it should come as no surprise that a calculated mob attack one of America’s neighborhoods with a high concentration of Orthodox Jews was ignored by the NYT. After all, the NYT had some major problems with the Holocaust.

ANOTHER WIN FOR TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT: My goodness, the great news just keeps coming on the transparency and accountability front. Check out the latest Citizen Auditor product from OpenTheBooks in my latest PJ Media column.

AN AUDI FOX, A SKIPPING TIMING BELT AND THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE: So it’s 1975 and the wife and I are sailing East on I-20, having just departed family in Tyler, Texas, and heading to the nation’s capitol. We’re driving a brand new brown/creme colored 1976 Audi Fox, first new car I’d ever bought.

Loved that little Audi because it had a great power-to-weight ratio, a fine-handling suspension set up, and a comfortable, intuitive interior design. It also had an inline-four cylinder engine with an overhead camshaft attached to a timing belt that suddenly decided to slip ever so slightly. Our journey was delayed until the necessary repair was made. I learned a great deal more about such things years later when I started racing a Formula Ford in the SCCA!

Why am I sharing this memory with you? Because it’s a great illustration of “Irreducible Complexity,” which just happens to be the point of biochemist Michael Behe’s Secrets of the Cell, Part 2, on HillFaith. Therein you will find the connection suggested in this post’s heading above. I don’t know if Behe ever owned an Audi Fox.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thanks to Occasional Reader for pointing out my reversible mis-type, i.e. Irreversible-which-should-be-Irreducible Complexity. A diplomat OR isn’t but he was right-on on the mistake.

SELL YOUR TESLA NOW! As soon as I heard Sheryl Crow was dumping her Tesla to protest Elon Musk, I knew the rapier wits at Issues & Insights would have something devastatingly entertaining to say about such nonsense. Sure enough, here it is.

TIME FOR ‘SPENDING DECISION TREE TRANSPARENCY:’ The first great landmark in proving transparency is Big Government’s worst enemy was the Freedom of Information Act. (FOIA) in 1966. The second was the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) of 2006.

The third should be, according to my latest PJ Media column, creation by Congress and President Donald Trump of web site that enables any citizen with access to the Internet to use the Spending Decision Tree Transparency (SDTT) system that makes public the names, titles and actions of every decision-maker in a series of decisions that results in federal tax dollars being spent.

Yes, it would require a great deal of creative thinking and insight into how government spending decisions are made. But I recall too well not that long ago when the “experts” said there was no way to put all federal spending on the Internet. They were wrong and today we have USASpending.gov, as mandated by FFATA. Why not Spending Decision Tree Transparency.gov?

HAS TRUMP EXHAUSTED THE LEFT? Reaction wasn’t as expected to news late last week that Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought’s delegating to his top politically appointed deputies budget allocation authority. That’s a big deal if you understand the crucial role OMB plays in developing and administering the federal budget before and after Congress completes its work.

Folks on the Left traditionally have far better understood the crucial importance of their control of the federal bureaucracy, and thus reacted vastly more quickly and decisively to what they perceive as any attack on its power or perogatives.

But then came Donald Trump II armed to the teeth with eight years worth of hard lessons learned about the Left and its bureaucracy. His first three weeks have seen an unexpected assault on multiple fronts on every major aspect of the federal Leviathan, including the bureaucracy.

Yes, the federal worker unions and their litigious Left-wing non-profit allies predictably headed to federal court in waves in the first two weeks, cheered on by the Mainstream Media. But then comes week three, Vought makes his move, and it’s all but crickets.

To be sure, Monday was a federal holiday and the courts were closed, so maybe there will be a new wave tomorrow. But check out my report today in The Epoch Times for more on the muted reaction to a key prong of the Trump campaign to reform the federal government and its workforce.

HALF OF ALL PALESTINIANS ARE EX-PATS: There are actually an estimated six million Palestinians who do NOT live in Gaza or the West Bank, but when was the last time you read or heard that fact mentioned in the Mainstream Media. Richard Pollock, in his latest Substack column, further notes that there are two million Palestinians living in Israel.

“Having established themselves for half a century or more in their adopted homes, few consider going back to the West Bank or Gaza. So living outside of the Gaza Strip isn’t unthinkable. In fact, it has been thinkable for quite some time,” Pollock points out.

“And there is another special kind of Palestinian expat that has been a well-kept secret. This group consists of fabulously wealthy Palestinians who are derisively called by the Palestinian man-on-the-street as the ‘exiled bourgeoise of Palestine,’” he adds.

In other words, don’t believe the claim the Palestinians can only live in Gaza and the West Bank. So why do the people pushing that claim do so? Could it be they have a stake through Non-Government Organizations (NGO) in the funding that would flow to re-settling the two million displaced by the conflict incited by the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre of more than 1,000 innocent Israelis.

MEET THE EMPEROR PENGUIN: Why anybody or any creature would be found in the Antarctic region of the Earth is beyond me, but there are some rather amazing animals there. Regardless of your views on evolution, ID, etc., check out this John 10:10 video on HillFaith detailing the remarkable ways the largest of the multiple Penguin types keeps warm. We do live in a wondrous world, regardless how you think it came to be.

A VISIONARY THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Don’t yet know the identity behind EKO on Substack, but today’s “Golden Age: The American Renaissance” is a deeply thought provoking look at what Trump’s continuous references to Canada as the 51st state may well signify about this country’s future.

A HILLFAITH SATURDAY TWO-FER: First Two-Fer is a look at a burgeoning effort in some corners of evangelical Christianity known as the “Deconstruction Movement.” Typically, some high profile evangelical figure announces that, having “deconstructed” some aspect of their understanding of Christianity, they are no longer Christians.

There is then a flurry of admiring media coverage, the figure gets a few profitable engagements in supportive secular settings, and then we all go on living our lives. It remains to be seen how enduring this phenomenon proves to be.

In the meantime, thoughtful Christians, of whom there are many here among the legions of intelligent Instapunditeers, should find the latest “What Would You Say?” 5:33 video produced by the Colson Center on HillFaith to be quite helpful.

Saturday Two-Fer Number Two: Can one five-letter acronym really explain how the universe came to be? Not in every infinitely fascinating detail, of course not. But Dr. Frank Turek of crossexamined.org shows SURGE goes a long way in answering deep questions in this delightful two-minute graphic video on HillFaith.