RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/27/doge-is-waging-a-class-war-on-americas-new-clerisy/

The ever-mounting hysteria over Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seems to largely be coming from that large sector of Americans who work for, or in other ways feed from, Washington’s seemingly bottomless trough. As government employment and spending have cascaded in recent years, this has created not so much a ‘deep state’, as the right-wing paranoids suspect, but a huge and expanding protected class of people who are anxious to defend their livelihoods.

Most anti-DOGE jeremiads avoid questions of class or self-interest. Predictable Democratic allies, like the Atlantic, accuse Musk of presiding over a ‘reign of ineptitude’ and waging war on defenseless civil servants. Some suggest that this reflects a deep-seated desire by GOP neanderthals to remove objective ‘empiricists’ from Washington – presumably the same ‘experts’ who led the nation into mounting debt, high inflation, increasing class divisions and a chronic inability to get things built at reasonable cost.

Many have resorted to the tired, old ‘fascist’ meme. Anne Applebaum sees Musk’s disruption of the federal bureaucracy as nothing less than the arrival of authoritarian ‘regime change’. As if auditing the bureaucracy is now the first step towards totalitarianism. Even some populist conservatives have warned that the fallout from DOGE’s cuts will ultimately harm vulnerable working-class people the most.

The class dynamics at play in DOGE are not as straightforward as some would have it. It’s not simply a case of Musk, the billionaire oligarch, ruthlessly attacking the lowly administrator. The impetus for DOGE is primarily driven by a conflict within the middle class. On one side are public workers whose pay, and pensions, well exceed those in the private sector. On the other, there are millions who pay tax and feel harassed by regulations, particularly among Trump’s base of small business owners. Millions of middle- and working-class families not sucking the federal teat are falling ever behind the affluent elites, who seem to control the state whichever party is in power.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/25/the-american-right-needs-to-cut-out-the-vice-signalling/

So having voted out the virtue-signallers, now the good people of America must suffer the vice-signallers? Take Steve Bannon’s salute at CPAC. We all know what he was up to. He was triggering the libs and titillating the Very Online right. It was a massive troll designed to get the CNN crowd fuming and the ironic fascists of X chuckling. So 77million US voters say a firm No to the eccentric ideologies of the faux-virtuous liberal elite, only to see them replaced by the eccentric antics of vice-flirting conservatives? Great.

It was at the end of his CPAC speech that Bannon – a key intellectual player in the first Trump administration – executed a forceful straight-armed salute. Exactly as he will have anticipated, and no doubt desired, the leftish media went nuts. He’s playing ‘footsie with Nazism’, said CNN host W Kamau Bell. Some on the right weren’t happy, either. Jordan Bardella, leader of France’s far-right National Rally, pulled out of his CPAC spot over Bannon’s ‘gesture referring to Nazi ideology’. Listen, when even the National Rally, a party founded by a literal Holocaust denier, thinks you’re a tad too fascist-adjacent, it’s time for some self-reflection.

Bannon says it was just a ‘wave’. Come on, Steve – I regularly wave at friends but I usually manage to do it without looking like Hitler at Munich in 1937. There are two possible explanations for his salute: either he’s a Nazi and he wants the world to know or he is so insanely invested in the tragic virtual sport of ‘owning the left’ that he’s even willing to mimic a Sieg Heil to piss these people off. I think it’s the latter. And while that’s definitely better than his being an actual SS fanboy, it still doesn’t bode well for the new America that such digital conservative frivolity has exploded into the real world.

I have no time either for those shouting, ‘This is proof he’s a Nazi!’, or those saying, ‘It was just a Roman salute!’, a gesture some claim was a customary greeting back in Ancient Rome. The former are just airing their long-held, lazy belief that Trump and everyone connected with him is a fascist. It’s not 2016, guys – the Literally Hitler stuff doesn’t land anymore.

https://townhall.com/columnists/setonmotley/2025/02/25/doge-is-constitutional-what-its-exposing-is-unconstitutional-n2652721

The Deep State Swamp and its denizens and creatures are up in arms about what President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing with their Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).  

What these tens of millions of career thieves really are?  Is embarrassed – and very, very worried.  DC has been the biggest and longest-running con in world history.  These stewards of the scam have spent these many decades pocketing trillions of our dollars.  While pretending to be looking out for US.

Then Trump and Musk parachute in with their DOGE.  FINALLY someone is examining what DC has for decades been doing to US.  And the usual suspects – who should be convicts – are screeching.

My favorite of their defenses of the indefensible?  “DOGE is unconstitutional!!!”  Even a former Ronald Reagan Administration associate White House counsel – Alan Charles Raul – makes the assertion:

“What is not debatable, however, is that Congress has not authorized this radical overhaul, and the protocols of the Constitution do not permit statutorily mandated agencies and programs to be transformed — or reorganized out of existence — without congressional authorization.

“The Constitution is well known to interpose meaningful checks and balances and a separation of powers among the responsibilities of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. It is also well understood that the respective branch’s powers and duties will intersect and overlap.  Fundamentally, however, all legislative power belongs to Congress, and executive power to the president.”   

And right there – where we emboldened – Raul proves himself wrong and Trump-Musk-DOGE right.  Trump is the chief executive of the Executive Branch.  He can run his branch of the government however he wishes.  

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/25/no-trumps-tariffs-will-not-cause-inflation/

President Trump has imposed 10 percent tariffs on imports from China. Predictably, the media’s chicken littles shrieked that the sky was falling. Tariffs will raise prices! Not only that but the poor will be hardest hit! Just think of the children!

These arguments are easily dismissed as appeals to emotion—they are rhetorical flourishes, devoid of truth and meaning. In reality, both history and logic prove that tariffs will not increase prices in the long run. Rest easy: the sky remains high above your head.

The Time Traveler

Every time President Trump threatens to raise tariffs, the media clucks that American consumers will pay the price. This did not happen last time, and it is unlikely to happen now. Consider the great washing machine debacle of 2018.

In January of 2018, President Trump announced that he would impose a 40 percent tariff on imported washing machines. On top of this, he also imposed additional duties on imported steel and aluminum—lightning occasionally strikes twice.

At the time, liberals lost their collective minds. They lamented that low-income Americans would not be able to afford washing machines. They pontificated that we would be living in a nation of grungy, soiled masses—living caricatures of Pig-Pen from the Peanut’s gang.

Of course, that never happened.

The price of washing machines did not change appreciably over the next few years. This is obvious when looking at the Consumer Price Index (“CPI”). The CPI tracks the prices of over 80,000 consumer goods and services in cities across America. They do this every month. How? They contact stores and obtain actual sale prices.

What did the CPI have to say about the price of washing machines in the aftermath of President Trump’s insidious wave of tariffs? Not much.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/obama-judge-hands-trump-a-victory/

Fourteen states, all led by Democrats, sought to stop Elon Musk’s DOGE from accessing data systems at seven federal agencies. On Tuesday, a federal judge found that the Democrats had not carried their burden “and therefore plaintiffs’ motion is DENIED.”

The federal judge was Tanya Chutkan, a donor to Obama’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, and appointed by the composite character president in 2014. Assigned to the cases of January 6, 2021, Chutkan handed out prison sentences even longer than the government requested. Before that, Chutkan handled a case with significance for national security that after seven years remains unresolved.

Of all the IT people in all the IT firms in all the world, House Democrats thought Imran Awan was best man for the job. Sometimes working from his native Pakistan, Awan and his family team accessed the computers of some 40 Democrats on the intelligence and foreign affairs committees. Without their consent, Awan and his team stashed the Democrats’ data on a server controlled by Xavier Becerra, then chair of the House Democratic Caucus.

Capitol Police wanted a copy of the server but the one Awan produced turned out a fake. In February, 2017, Awan got booted off the House computer network but Becerra had already fled to California where Gov. Jerry Brown made him attorney general. Becerra had nothing to say about Awan’s IT intrigue, and Chutkan provided additional protection. The Obama judge repeatedly delayed Awan’s trial on bank-fraud charges, and the case did not become a factor in the 2018 election that kept Becerra in the AG slot.

In August of 2018, Chutkan sentenced Awan to time served, his single day in detention and 11 months of GPS monitoring and three months’ supervision. “There have been numerous allegations lobbed at him from the highest branches of the government,” the judge said, “all of which have been proved to be without foundation by the FBI and the Department of Justice.” In reality, Awan had never been formally charged with unauthorized possession of government material or anything of the sort. Judge Chutkan, a vocal opponent of President Trump’s travel ban, conveniently left out the context and background.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz charged that Awan was “put under scrutiny because of his religious faith and that “the right-wing media circus fringe” was jumping to conclusions. Awan’s attorney Chris Gowen, a former aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, said Awan’s arrest for bank fraud was “clearly a right-wing media-driven prosecution by a United States Attorney’s Office that wants to prosecute people for working while Muslim.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/25/musk-is-shredding-government-not-even-close/

As night follows day, Democrats and their champions in the mainstream press have started trotting out their shopworn horror stories about budget cuts. And why not? It’s always worked in the past, turning Republicans’ knees into jelly. President Donald Trump needs to tell them to man up this time, and he can start by calling out the left’s world-is-about-to-end nonsense.

Anyone who follows the news would think that Trump and Elon Musk are carpet bombing the federal government. We keep seeing headlines about how Musk and DOGE are “shredding” and “dissecting” the federal government, about how spending cuts are causing “cruel and senseless devastation,” and the “human toll of the administration’s malevolence and incompetence.”

Reporters are busy scouring the earth for any sob story they can find – or make up – to put a human face on this supposed tragic turn of events, such as those poor federal workers who are confused and scared about having to list five things they did the previous week.

Then there are the repeated proclamations about “growing anger” among the public about the heartlessness of it all – with no evidence to support it – and how this is “putting Republicans in a difficult position.” (Never mind that Trump’s approval rating is currently higher than it ever was in his first term, according to the latest Harvard-Harris poll.)

The cumulative effect of all this is meant to rankle the public and put pressure on GOP lawmakers to make it stop.

Well, it’s time for a reality check.

As is always the case when it comes to cutting federal spending, both sides exaggerate what is going on. The ones cutting spending want the public to think they are hitting bone — witness Musk brandishing his chainsaw at the CPAC convention. The big government types want to play up the supposed harm. The result is usually that little, if anything, actually ends up getting cut.

https://spectator.org/judicial-resistance-setting-itself-epic-smackdown/

America, unfortunately, has long been suffering from a crisis of civics. Put simply, many Americans are woefully ignorant about the structure and features of their government. But every so often, an opportunity emerges to reteach some basics. The media’s predictable shrieks and howls of “constitutional crisis” notwithstanding, we are in the throes of a grand separation-of-powers standoff that will both serve as one such edifying civics lesson.

First: Enter the energetic executive.

In his frenetic opening weeks, President Donald Trump has channeled the spirit of The Federalist No. 70, in which Alexander Hamilton argued that only a unitary executive can govern with “decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch.” In starker, more modern terms, this newer Trumpian era has fully embraced two key principles associated with close MAGA allies: Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” and Elon Musk’s “move fast and break things.” The crux is that people are easily distracted, often overwhelmed, and frequently overcome by shiny-object syndrome. This is especially true in today’s 24/7 social media environment.

Those two mantras explain how we get these remarkable first few weeks — this more assertive, more dynamic MAGA machine. We see “move fast and break things” in such moves as the executive orders on birthright citizenship and rooting out both “diversity, equity and inclusion” and gender ideology from the federal government.

We see it in the U.S. Agency for International Development wind-down, and we see it in the anticipated termination of the Department of Education. And we see “flood the zone” in the daily frenzy of executive orders. Indeed, White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf’s daily physical handing of new executive orders to Trump to sign has emerged as an unlikely cable TV fixture.

And now: Enter the judicial “resistance.”

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/america/trump-is-no-dictator/

Let me start this reply to Roger Partridge’s column (Trump’s War on Constitutional Democracy) by laying my cards on the table.  I know Roger Partridge.  He is one of the best lawyers in New Zealand.  He, like me, has grave worries about the sort of judicial activism or judicial usurpation of the role of Parliament that he sees over across the Tasman (and which, in enervated form, is on clear display here in Australia too).  Indeed, Roger and I have worked in parallel and at times together to try to rein back  the current imperial judiciary in New Zealand, a set of top judges seemingly intent on making significant inroads into parliamentary sovereignty simply by decreeing new supposed realities in big-ticket cases.  Indeed, in an excellent recent report, ‘Who Makes the Law? Reining in the Supreme Court’, Roger sets out the problems chapter and verse and then offers proposals to ameliorate this big-ticket problem.

He and I are fully in agreement about what is happening in New Zealand and I support all of his proposals. But for my purposes today I thought it best to begin by noting how much he and I agree about the state of Antipodean judicial and constitutional affairs.

I need to note that because I certainly do not agree with how Roger has characterised the first month or so of the second term of President Trump in Saturday’s Quadrant Online.   Readers who haven’t done so should first look at what Roger argued. Here’s a sample:

♦ Roger notes that Trump has made 50 executive orders since taking office a little over a month ago.  (Roger does not tell readers that Joe Biden issued 60 such orders in more or less the same amount of time.)

♦ He condemns Trump’s use of emergency powers as regards justifying tariffs on Mexico and Canada and suspending asylum applications.

♦ He claims that Trump is trying to rewrite the 14th Amendment by executive order to stop birthright citizenship.

♦ He praises the lower Federal Court judges who have issued nationwide injunctions to stop the suspension of asylum claims and birthright citizenship applications.  Indeed, he cites what some of these judges have said.  But Roger never lets readers know that every such injunction-issuing judge was a Democrat appointee.

♦ He notes J.D. Vance’s questioning of whether unelected judges have this authority to override executive power and Vance’s assertion that such actions by judges is constitutionally illegal. For Roger, that sort of scepticism ‘reveals a fundamental attack on constitutional government’.

As an aside, when Roger writes a report detailing how New Zealand judges have gone off the rails – and they have – by legislating from the bench is he not in that context ‘openly questioning judicial authority’?  And what’s wrong with such questioning?  Moreover, there would be plenty of left-wing Kiwis in the so-called ‘Judge’s Party’ who would word-for-word characterise Roger’s who-makes-the-law? critique as ‘a fundamental attack on constitutional government’.

But back to the US.  Is the Vice-President somehow constitutionally prevented from criticising unelected judges?  If so, that’s a constitutional norm I have never heard of and certainly would not support.  I think what Roger really appears to dislike is the hint Vance makes that the Trump administration might in extremis simply ignore these lower court injunctions – you know, the way President Lincoln did when he flat out ignored the Supreme Court’s writ of habeas corpus as regards arbitrarily detaining citizens and the way that President Jefferson wrote what he would do if democratic executive government were to be hamstrung by activist judges.  I will come back to this issue.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/23/the-three-amigos-give-a-progress-report/

Whatever else you can say about the  Joe Biden administration, I think you have to admit that its effort to keep the public informed about its progress in realizing the president’s agenda was impressive.  I think, for example, of the way his press secretary memorialized his first month in office.  She convened a briefing at the White House on February 20 at which three senior members of the new administration gave reports on their progress in realizing the president’s agenda and then answered questions from reporters.

What, you don’t remember that? Neither do I. I had briefly confused the masked ball that was the early months of the Biden administration with stunning performance of Trump and his team in these early weeks. There is Trump himself, of course, who thrives on his exchanges with the press. His prime lieutenants—Vice President J. D Vance, for example, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have been front and center giving talks, answering questions, and responding to criticisms.

One of the most impressive performances—it is not too much to call it historic—occurred on February 20 when press Secretary Karoline Leavitt invited Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz to the podium to say a few words about the administration’s accomplishments during its first month in office. They touched on everything from Trump’s dismantling of the DEI concession in government to inflation and the economy to foreign policy, especially with respect to the war in Ukraine.

Stephen Miller, who spoke first, set the tone when he described the culture of DEI as the “illegal” practice of discrimination based on race and/or sex. What we call “diversity, equity, and inclusion” today is really just a more toxic form of the “affirmative action” mandates that have been with us for decades. The key to the success of both is based on a rhetorical sleight-of-hand.  Talk about “equality” but practice discrimination. It’s nice work if you can get it.

By ending DEI throughout the federal government, Miller said, Trump has “restored merit as the cornerstone of all federal policy; restored the full, fair, impartial enforcement of our federal civil rights laws for the first time in generations; and he has cracked down on individuals across this government and nonprofits who have engaged in illegal racial discrimination against the American people.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-2-20-the-end-of-the-eric-adams-prosecution-and-hoiier-than-thou-federal-prosecutors

Since my post a few days ago about the demise of the Eric Adams prosecution, controversy has continued to swirl around the matter. On the side supporting the action of the Trump/Bondi Justice Department, several new voices have emerged to join what were previously the lonely cries of a handful of people like myself and Josh Blackman. These new voices include James Copland and Rafael Mangual (of the Manhattan Institute), writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on February 18; and Alan Dershowitz in a column in the New York Post on February 19.

On the other side of the argument, an ex-colleague of mine sends me a copy of an “open letter” dated February 17, and signed by a gigantic list of well over 1000 former federal prosecutors. This letter essentially adopts the arguments set forth in the resignation letter of ex-SDNY US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, including echoing some of her language. A fair description is that these guys adopt a holier-than-thou attitude, claiming to be wholly pure and above politics and devoted only to the “facts and law.” Here are some excerpts:

As prosecutors, we were rightly prohibited from making criminal charging decisions based on someone’s political association, activities or beliefs, or because of our personal feelings about them. We knew it was impermissible to treat a defendant more leniently just because they were powerful or well-connected, or more harshly because they were not. We were taught to pursue justice without fear or favor, and knew our decisions to investigate and charge should be based only on the facts and the law. . . . Against this backdrop, we have watched with alarm as these values have been tested by recent actions of the Department’s leadership. Some of you have been ordered to make charging decisions based expressly on considerations other than the facts and the law, including to serve solely political purposes. To all of you, we communicate this: We salute and admire the courage many of you have already exhibited, and that will guide all of you as you continue to serve the interests of justice. You have responded to ethical challenges of a type no public servant should ever be forced to confront with principle and conviction, in the finest traditions of the Department of Justice.

The bold is in the original.