RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/help_the_establishment_s_fallen_and_can_t_get_up.html

The Senate’s confirmation hearings for President Trump’s political appointees have been gladiatorial spectacles.  Tulsi Gabbard; Kash Patel; and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. followed Pete Hegseth’s example in demonstrating fierce determination and an unwillingness to have their honor questioned by dishonorable Democrats.  

Gabbard told the Intelligence Committee that the Russia collusion hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and her own experiences as a Biden regime surveillance target proved that the CIA and its sister agencies had become politicized weapons endangering the Republic.  Kennedy admonished Senator Bernie Sanders for being a bought-and-paid-for stooge of the pharmaceutical industry.  When Senator Adam Schiff (who should be a defendant, not a lawmaker) accused Patel of betraying law enforcement officers, the next director of the FBI stared back intently and reminded inveterate liar Schiff that those who police our streets know who has their backs.  

These types of hearings have gotten increasingly combative over the last thirty years, but this aggressive jousting between nominees and lawmakers is something new.  What we’re watching is not just rhetorical gamesmanship or made-for-TV fireworks meant to capture distracted Americans’ attention.  Like their boss in the White House — whose mug shot from the Fulton County Jailhouse in Atlanta, Georgia, two years ago only added to Trump’s legend as an everyman hero — these nominees have approached their confirmation hearings with a stoic seriousness befitting an administration whose every move conveys a simple message: “There’s a new sheriff in town.”  When Patel gave Schiff the “evil eye” and calmly asserted that his friends in blue had his six, I thought the corrupt California senator wet his pants.

Will the nominees be confirmed?  If the proceedings were done entirely in secret, they would not.  As more Americans have steadily realized, the U.S. Senate is not divided between Republicans and Democrats.  Almost all senators are stalwart members of the same Uniparty.  The Senate is a privileged chamber of egomaniacal “nobles” who work for the Intelligence Community, protect the permanent bureaucracy, and remain loyal only to their Establishment Club.  Most Senate “Republicans” oppose Trump and his nominees.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-spawn-of-leviathan/

For more than a century, our Constitutional rights and freedoms have been insidiously eroded by the progressives’ technocratic imperialism of government agencies. This virtual fourth branch of our government has usurped the powers of the other three legitimate ones that the Framers crafted to check and balance, and hold accountable the ambitions of nascent tyranny.

The dangers of regulatory hypertrophy have been recognized since Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835-40.

A century later, even the progressive Walter Lippman, in his 1937 book The Good Society, warned of the dangers of an expansive executive branch and its agencies unaccountable to the citizens: “It is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.”

Pace Lippman, the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, and the growing resistance of the “forgotten citizens” exercising their right to vote, have put in the White House an administration that is leading a counterrevolution against the “treason of the agency clerks,” and their violations of our Constitutional rights. Trump and his aides are investigating agencies like the FBI and DOJ, along with other intrusive outfits such as the EEOC and EPA, and the corrupt globalist slush fund, the U.S. Agency for International Development––and demanding from them accountability to their new boss and we the people he serves.

Created in 1980, the Department of Education has been one of Leviathan’s most pernicious regulatory spawn, for the ordered liberty of a diverse free people depends on what Alan Bloom calls “education for freedom, particularly the freedom of the mind.”

So, it is important that Trump has also put on the chopping block the DOE, a particularly gross violator of the guardrails of federalism, state sovereignty, and the principles of localism, particularly important for K-12 schools, given the critical role of families, churches, and neighborhoods in education.

Moreover, the DOE has become ground zero for dubious pedagogical fads, and the politicizing of our schools, using taxpayer money to promote progressive and leftist ideological goals, while sacrificing its mission to teach the foundational skills necessary for creating informed citizens.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/13/5-trillion-reasons-why-doge-should-have-access-to-treasurys-payment-system/

In the brief time when Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team had access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, they discovered that the government’s bookkeeping is so sloppy they can’t say where checks are going or why. That the government sends money to people on “do not pay” lists. And that some $100 billion worth of entitlement money goes to people with no Social Security number or temporary ID.

“This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately,” Musk posted on X after a federal judge blocked his access to the system.

Musk is right about this being insane. But just how insane isn’t obvious – until you realize that each year the federal government writes almost $5 trillion worth of checks for individuals. (It’s expected to be $4.8 trillion this fiscal year, and is on track to top $5.7 trillion by 2029.)

Today, more than two-thirds of all the money spent by the federal government are for what the government labels as “direct payments for individuals,” which it defines as “spending programs designed to transfer income (in cash or in kind) to individuals or families.”

This isn’t money to buy weapons, or build roads and bridges, or maintain national parks. It doesn’t pay salaries for government workers or soldiers, or fund Congress. It doesn’t fund NASA, or get shipped abroad as international aid. It doesn’t go toward securing the border. This is cash, taken out of Peter’s pocket and handed over to Paul.

Yes, it includes things such as food stamps and housing subsidies, but the vast bulk of it is made up of middle-class entitlements paid for by middle-class taxpayers (minus the federal government’s cut).

Up until 1945, these “direct payments” accounted for a small fraction of federal spending. But they then steadily rose as FDR’s New Deal programs started kicking in. They got another huge boost from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and by 1972 ate up 40% of all federal spending, which was roughly where they stayed until Bill Clinton pushed it up to the 60% range. By the end of Barack Obama’s second term, as Obamacare was taking hold, payments for individuals topped 70% of all federal spending. They reached an all-time high of 72.2% of all federal spending in 2022 under Joe Biden.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/13/mythologies-about-musk/

Here are some of the untruths told about Elon Musk and DOGE.

“Musk has no right to cut USAID.” 

Elon Musk and his team are not cutting any federal programs.

They are auditors. They were given legal authority under a presidential executive order creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Its mandate is to identify waste, abuse, fraud, and irrelevance in the federal budget at a time when the U.S. is $37 trillion in debt.

The agency will expire on July 4, 2026.

Ultimately, Trump can propose program cuts, but Congress holds the authority to approve or reject them. He may or may not act on all, some, or none of the DOGE recommendations.

“No one elected Musk.” 

Like hundreds of government officials, Musk was appointed by an elected president to run an agency that does not require Senate confirmation.

Musk is as legally legitimate as the national security advisor and his National Security Council, none of whom require Senate confirmation.

Does the left believe former national security advisor Jake Sullivan, who made decisions far more pivotal than Musk, had no authority to do so because he too was neither elected nor confirmed by the Senate?

“It is a dangerous precedent to give a private citizen billionaire like Musk so much power.”

In fact, Musk has far more legal authority than did FDR’s best friend Harry Hopkins. He moved into the White House and de facto set U.S. foreign assistance policies toward Stalin’s Russia.

Musk’s position is more akin to past captains of industry like Henry Ford, Henry Kaiser, and William Knudson appointed by FDR to run the wartime economy.

None of them were either elected or confirmed by the Senate. All of them helped to save a poorly armed US after the debacle of Pearl Harbor.

“Foreign aid is ending.”

Hardly.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/a_united_america_is_democrats_undoing.html

Of all the things I loathe about the Democrat party, its celebration of victimhood takes the cake.  As is true of all political parties infected with virulent Marxism, it does not seek to help those truly in need.  It does the opposite.  It seeks out people who might never have seen themselves as victims and convinces them otherwise.  It is a party whose growth in membership is directly proportional to Democrats’ capacity to convert Americans into victims.  

Once a person understands Democrats’ pathological need to harvest new victims, it becomes obvious that they are not in the business of solving problems.  Fixing anything in society only reduces the number of future Democrats.  By celebrating victimhood, Democrats are committed to making things worse today than they were yesterday and even worse tomorrow than they are today.  Their growth model depends upon perpetual misery.

Americans saw this self-destructive phenomenon play out during Obama’s presidency.  Before the 2008 election, race relations between black and white Americans had steadily improved since the ’60s.  Racism was widely rejected as a repugnant practice of the past.  In fact, discrimination based upon the color of a person’s skin had become so offensive that courts were dismantling affirmative action programs that explicitly prioritized race over merit.  A lot of Republican voters, unhappy with their party’s nomination of Senator John McCain, crossed lines and voted for Barack Obama’s nebulous promise of “hope and change” with the expectation that a post-racial America would take root.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder chose another path.  They looked for ways to inflame racial tensions.  They deconstructed a half-century of American racial progress by routinely injecting racial controversy into matters that had nothing to do with skin color.  A black Harvard professor is detained in the Democrat stronghold of Cambridge, Massachusetts?  That’s because all cops are unconsciously racist (even the black ones).  A black male dies in a confrontation with a neighborhood watchman?  That’s because black boys are hunted outside their own communities.  Americans don’t want to pay more for worse health care?  That’s because wealthy white Americans are too selfish to understand the appeal of socialized medicine.  

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/11/department-of-veterans-affairs-eliminates-178000-in-politico-subscriptions/

On Monday, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced that it had discovered and subsequently canceled $178,000 in subscriptions to Politico Pro, in the latest uncovered example of excessive government spending.

As reported by Fox News, VA Secretary Doug Collins made the announcement in a post on the social media site X, saying that he “ran across a $178,000 contract VA had with Politico and we promptly canceled it. That money can be better spent on Veterans health care!”

“It’s a new day at VA,” said Secretary Collins in a subsequent statement to the press. “We’re putting Veterans at the center of everything the department does, focusing relentlessly on customer service and convenience. We’re working every day to find new and better ways of helping VA beneficiaries. That means cutting wasteful spending and redirecting resources toward programs that benefit Veterans, families, survivors and caregivers.”

The news comes after a previous revelation that the entirety of the federal government had spent over $8 million on Politico subscriptions. This and other examples of government spending have been targeted by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Politico issued a statement denying that the publication was a “beneficiary of government programs.”

“As surely many of you saw today, there was a spirited discussion at the White House and among officials connected to the Department of Government Efficiency on the subject of government subscriptions for journalism products, at POLITICO and other news organizations,” said Politico’s CEO Goli Sheikholeslami and editor-in-chief John Harris in an internal memo distributed to staff on Wednesday.

President Trump, along with Musk and DOGE, has vowed to severely cut government spending that is determined to be wasteful, and to abolish federal jobs and even entire agencies that are determined to be unnecessary or redundant. DOGE has especially targeted the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as the Department of Education.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/12/the-democrats-doth-protest-too-much-methinks/

The Democrats’ reaction to the Department of Government Efficiency’s necessary mission might seem a bit excessive. But it is understandable. Their taxpayer-funded slush fund has been exposed.

Rather than joining with Elon Musk, who is leading DOGE to root out federal waste and fraud, and improve the transparency of the murky federal leviathan, the Democrats are attacking him. At a rally a week ago outside the Capitol, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley, chanted “Elon Musk must go” along with a rabble that seems eager to do harm to the South African billionaire.

There have been similar protests in other cities in which baying mobs demand that Musk be deported, sexually violated, even launched to Mars.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Progressive Caucus wants the Democrats to find a way to “fire” Musk. New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer has groused on X that “an unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” surely unaware that he’s implying that the permanent bureaucracy is a separate, unaccountable, untouchable and unconstitutional branch of the government. Harpy pundits swear Musk is carrying out a coup and is a threat to democracy, a frivolous slogan that the political left cannot resist using.

Other complaints against the DOGE operation included grousing that Musk’s team has access to sensitive Treasury data and is holding back important federal programs.

But the real reason the Democrats are so upset is because their racket at the U.S. Agency for International Aid has been exposed, and they fear it’s just the first of many similar duplicitous schemes throughout the government that will be uncovered. They’ve even been able to convince their core voters that Musk and his team, merely doing the job they were asked to do by the duly elected president, are pure evil that must be stopped.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/02/11/democrats-loved-unelected-power-trump-weapons-against-them/

With Democrats in disarray and unable to choose a positive theme, they have settled on the obvious alternative. Unite around their shared hatreds. Near the top of that list is Elon Musk and his Doge project. “Nobody elected Musk.” “He is more powerful than the president.” Time magazine tried to drive home that point by depicting him behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

These attacks are manifestly untrue, but they follow a shrewd piece of political advice, given by the old Leftist organiser, Saul Alinsky. Personalise your political grievances. Let one person stand for much bigger complaints. It’s easier to mobilise around that concrete target and move on to bigger goals by taking him down.

Republicans recognise the risk here. They have responded by pointing out that Musk answers directly to president Trump. There are no middlemen, no bureaucratic protections. Trump can fire Musk as soon as he becomes a political liability. That, of course, is what Democrats hope to make him.

This predictable back-and-forth is part of a broader attack on Trump’s swift, aggressive actions against entrenched Washington power centres. Rolling them back and asserting control is the heart of Trump’s MAGA agenda.

Both sides recognise that basic point, but they have overlooked another, equally important one that illuminates the long arc of America’s changing governance. Democrats created all the tools Trump is using to attack official Washington. Oops. They hoped to centralise power in the presidency and break through the old limitations of the 1787 Constitution. They largely succeeded after decades of effort. 

What the authors of this transformation never expected was a president who would use the great powers they handed him to dismantle their own cherished projects. Yet that is exactly what Trump is doing.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21385/maganomics-fusion-energy

America’s next great economic revolution — to be spearheaded by President Donald J. Trump — is currently being studied by the preeminent polling firm, John McLaughlin Associates.

A poll will investigate America’s next great economic and technological frontier: clean, limitless, inexpensive energy through nuclear fusion by a made in America nuclear reactor superior to China’s tokamak.

This new 21st Century Manhattan Project would entail a trailblazing, all-out effort to compete against Communist China, already investing billions into this field.

Just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt headed the original Manhattan Project, when America raced to develop a nuclear weapon before scientists in Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan could unlock its enormous deadly power and use it against the Allies in World War II, Trump could usher in a new Clean Controlled Fusion Energy Revolution.

In that era, Roosevelt recognized the existential threat and directed all necessary resources to win that fateful race. Today, we know China is investing enormous sums into fusion energy research that seeks to create a sustained reaction that would be channeled to create unlimited electricity. America must create technology that is far superior to China’s tokamak fusion reactors.