The left can’t get wide spread support for their insane ideas. So they use the darkness and bigness of government to implement their insanity with our tax dollars. The weakness is obviously that with the will a President can eliminate it all. Most of it isn’t law. They can’t get it into law. Most of it. Trump has the will and then be found the team. You are right speed kills! Let’s see how active the activists are without our tax dollars to pay for their activism.
You can't help suspect that a lot of the crazy-sounding payments are just fronts. $6M for LGBT theatre in Guatamala or whatever it was does not sound like that money ever actually got to the theatre, if the theatre ever even existed - it went to an NGO which claimed to be doing this work, but nothing would ever be audited and the money could be used for anything the Left wanted once it has passed out of USAID control.
It appears that USAID was a CIA front for a giant slush fund to fund black ops and further coups around the planet. Let us hope that Zelenskyy soon finds asylum and the war in Ukraine ends.
Victoria Nuland should be shot and pissed on. Alexander Vindman, Fauci, Pelosi, and Schiff would all fit in a properly dug urine pit.
Read Neil Sheehan’s excellent “Bright Shining Lie” to learn about USAID’s involvement in the Vietnam war. Color revolutions are not new, and not limited to foreign soil!
Those who believe that Ukraine is a Marxist project need to learn more about Ukraine. It is a conservative and deeply Christian country that is closely aligned with conservative values. It took them decades to separate their church from Moscow patriarchy, which has been a project of KGB since 1922 after bolsheviks killed the patriarch of Russian Orthodox church and subsequently thousands of priests. Ukraine is where protestants also known as баптисты (baptists) have by far more religious freedom than in Russia. Yes, there is corruption in Ukraine, but did you ask which country kills political opponents with radioactive polonium in European capitals, and how much money Putin has in secret vaults all over the world? Just because Obama's government supported Ukrainians who wanted to join EU, we should not assign Ukraine into a woke asylum. Ukraine is the opposite of woke.
I would say that Ukraine is more of a mafia project than a Marxist project. After all, the coup allowed Hunter to skim off millions with the Burisma racket and Victoria Nuland was confident that the 2014 coup would put Russia at our mercy and a puppet in charge of Ukraine.
Do you really worry about how much money Putin has?
In closing, it was presented as fact during the 1st Trump impeachment, that Ukraine is the most corrupt nation in Europe. More recently, it has been said that Ukraine will never be part of NATO because of its flagrant corruption.
Putin doesn't need tanks and troops to get rid of Zelenskyyyy. He should use bug spray.
Yes, I worry about Putin's money, because when Putin became a government employee he had nothing. He has been a government employee all his life, with a very modest salary, yet, his wealth is reportedly well over $40 billion. By other reports he is richer than Elon Musk. If that does not say much about Russian corruption, I don't know what else would. Maybe that the richest man of Russia was arrested in 2003 after criticizing Putin and his oil company worth $4 billion was sold to a business located above a barber shop in a small strip mall which was registered there for a few month prior to purchase. The company was then nationalized.
Unlike Putin, Zelensky became president as already successful businessman worth few million $$. Just like Trump.
Now, onto flagrant corruption. US had an issue of flagrant corruption throughout early 20th century. You noticed that Democrats are wildly corrupt. We are still a member of NATO. BTW, why would Trump pardon Blagoevich who was caught on record trying to sell Obama's Senate seat? For the record: I am an independent voter who left Republican Party after Bush went into Iraq. Call me woke.
The next time you visit Moscow to audit Putin's wealth, I'd like to travel with you. I've never been to Russia. I would never stoop to the level of calling anyone "woke". In my mind, that is the worst insult that can be applied to anyone.
Unlike you, I actually lived in Russia for 20 years and in another former USSR republic for 13 years. I visited Russia last time 20 years ago, before Putin declared his war on the West in 2007 in Munich (you may want to read up on that). I have close friends and relatives still in Russia, so I know quite a bit about what is going on. I can tell you for a fact that people get arrested for wearing sneakers in colors of Ukrainian flag or for singing a song in Ukrainian language. Nobody arrests those who speaks Russian language in Ukraine. As an American citizen, I would not advise a single American to travel to Russia right now, as any American citizen can become a bargaining chip in the trade for Russians convicted in US or Europe for the targeted assassinations of political opponents or for hacking into American banks. Now, to audits of Putin's assets. In 1990es, St. Petersburg city council conducted audit of what happened to the raw materials that Putin was responsible to exchange for food when people in the city were starving after collapse of the USSR. The woman who led this audit (university professor) had to leave city in a hurry and spent the rest of her life in hut in the remote village. Her friend who was supporting the audit was assassinated and many witnesses disappeared or died suddenly. The raw materials were about $270 million worth. Another critic of Putin who explain to the shocked public why apartment builidings exploded in 1999 in 3 cities including Moscow, was poisoned with radioactive polonium in London in a restaurant. Keep talking about Ukrainian mafia.
Churches that were closed belonged to the Moscow Patriarchy. The best analogy to Moscow Patriarchy are mosques in Iran where government and religion have merged. The head of Russian Patriarchy is a former KGB officer. Would you want your churches controlled by the country that occupied 20% of your territory?
Germany is closing mosques that spew anti-German propaganda. Is it wrong? Ukraine is doing the same, except the propaganda coming out of Russian churches denies Ukrainians their language and their right to have their own country.
Chris, I assume (and hope) that when DOGE identifies something that needs to be cut/canceled there is a process for making the head of the relevant department aware of it and that person actually pulls the trigger (so to speak) to make the cut. If this is the case I would suggest that your description of the process describe it accurately so that the nay sayers continuous crying that Musk is cutting all these things by himself is precluded. If it's not the way it is done, it should be.
As a Veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, and a proud naturalized American. I'm stunned to see how many students don't have basic knowledge after graduating from high school. The indoctrination has no place in public institutions. Not on our taxes. I'm hoping for a big shake of the Department of Education, and once we erect the new one, bring back the learning of hard skills, and foreign languages. I was educated in Romania, and by the time we left high school, most students were polyglots.
You are so right. The bureaucracy could so easily win. Think how many fat cats are living the cushy life in and around Washington. They have many many ways of undermining reform. (It is the same in Canada, around Ottawa.) This is a job for years long efforts, not just lightning speed.
This is going to take years. EO can be over turned with the stroke of a pen. We need legislation and some kind of permanent oversight so the Swamp can't start this crap right back up in 4, 8 ,12 years.
DOGE offers promising signs of a return to sanity. Their speed is their advantage: Bureaucrats need to form planning committees, write initial assessment reports, and hold at least three equitably-staffed meetings before they can take any action. DOGE? Review the evidence, then BOOM.
I’m 61 years now and as I think back most of my teachers and university professors were losers and weirdos. Some were brilliant and learned thank goodness but most were out of touch and kind of irrelevant people.
The quick followup to DOGE findings has to be radical transparency of the names of these ideological programs so those of us fighting to improve student outcomes at the local level can identify and root out those programs in use in local school districts.
Move fast and break things.. it’s hilarious watching the left melt down and defend the indefensible… hopefully the final step is block grants to states and the elimination of the AFT/NEA/DOE corruption apparatus
By the way, my job involves reading the tech media. If you don't read it, you would have no idea how much the tech media midwits hate Elon Musk and are bending every effort to misrepresent and discredit him. They even dumped on the idea of a Mars base.
Now, maybe a Mars base is a walk on the wild side. But so were the moonwalks in their day. The same type of tech media covered those eagerly.
My point is that something has changed in the tech media. Much less spirit of adventure and much more obedience to approved progressive doctrines. If they win, there will be no Mars base even if it is viable.
Jealousy likely. In the it's technically leaders were libertarians. Now, they are progressives. Hopefully the sane ones or ones who chase money like the IT'S ( Andreasen etc) will prevail
We need a stake in the heart of DoE before the bureaucrats can organize their resistance. Don't just prune it. We've got to raze the place and salt the ground asap or they'll grow back bigger and tougher.
Nothing in our current system of education will change in the actual classroom today until there is a giant shift in the colleges training future teachers. These young, vulnerable, idealistic students are brainwashed for 4-6 years in hundreds of schools of (mis)education and the ideology is perpetuated for generations. My classes for my elementary teaching credentials 45 years ago were a complete waste of time back then. I can’t imagine what they are like now! Thank goodness I discovered classical homeschooling for my seven children and continue to teach many many grandchildren.
And folks don’t know how deeply entrenched the left’s ideology is in the classrooms… in science, English, history, theology (in many Catholic schools), guest speakers and assemblies etc. etc. It’s a good start but it’s top-down… gonna take a while to clean the mindset out of the indoctrinated young teachers.
Waste is a sin. I like that. Likewise, for the US to consume more than it produces year after year, spending down our aggregate capital resources in the process, is a sin. A terrible human price was paid to build the modern world, which makes it all the more a sacred duty that we preserve its material foundations.
The left can’t get wide spread support for their insane ideas. So they use the darkness and bigness of government to implement their insanity with our tax dollars. The weakness is obviously that with the will a President can eliminate it all. Most of it isn’t law. They can’t get it into law. Most of it. Trump has the will and then be found the team. You are right speed kills! Let’s see how active the activists are without our tax dollars to pay for their activism.
You can't help suspect that a lot of the crazy-sounding payments are just fronts. $6M for LGBT theatre in Guatamala or whatever it was does not sound like that money ever actually got to the theatre, if the theatre ever even existed - it went to an NGO which claimed to be doing this work, but nothing would ever be audited and the money could be used for anything the Left wanted once it has passed out of USAID control.
It appears that USAID was a CIA front for a giant slush fund to fund black ops and further coups around the planet. Let us hope that Zelenskyy soon finds asylum and the war in Ukraine ends.
Victoria Nuland should be shot and pissed on. Alexander Vindman, Fauci, Pelosi, and Schiff would all fit in a properly dug urine pit.
Read Neil Sheehan’s excellent “Bright Shining Lie” to learn about USAID’s involvement in the Vietnam war. Color revolutions are not new, and not limited to foreign soil!
How many precious lives have been lost in the course of these evil operations. Take away the money - no more operation.
Those who believe that Ukraine is a Marxist project need to learn more about Ukraine. It is a conservative and deeply Christian country that is closely aligned with conservative values. It took them decades to separate their church from Moscow patriarchy, which has been a project of KGB since 1922 after bolsheviks killed the patriarch of Russian Orthodox church and subsequently thousands of priests. Ukraine is where protestants also known as баптисты (baptists) have by far more religious freedom than in Russia. Yes, there is corruption in Ukraine, but did you ask which country kills political opponents with radioactive polonium in European capitals, and how much money Putin has in secret vaults all over the world? Just because Obama's government supported Ukrainians who wanted to join EU, we should not assign Ukraine into a woke asylum. Ukraine is the opposite of woke.
I would say that Ukraine is more of a mafia project than a Marxist project. After all, the coup allowed Hunter to skim off millions with the Burisma racket and Victoria Nuland was confident that the 2014 coup would put Russia at our mercy and a puppet in charge of Ukraine.
Do you really worry about how much money Putin has?
In closing, it was presented as fact during the 1st Trump impeachment, that Ukraine is the most corrupt nation in Europe. More recently, it has been said that Ukraine will never be part of NATO because of its flagrant corruption.
Putin doesn't need tanks and troops to get rid of Zelenskyyyy. He should use bug spray.
Yes, I worry about Putin's money, because when Putin became a government employee he had nothing. He has been a government employee all his life, with a very modest salary, yet, his wealth is reportedly well over $40 billion. By other reports he is richer than Elon Musk. If that does not say much about Russian corruption, I don't know what else would. Maybe that the richest man of Russia was arrested in 2003 after criticizing Putin and his oil company worth $4 billion was sold to a business located above a barber shop in a small strip mall which was registered there for a few month prior to purchase. The company was then nationalized.
Unlike Putin, Zelensky became president as already successful businessman worth few million $$. Just like Trump.
Now, onto flagrant corruption. US had an issue of flagrant corruption throughout early 20th century. You noticed that Democrats are wildly corrupt. We are still a member of NATO. BTW, why would Trump pardon Blagoevich who was caught on record trying to sell Obama's Senate seat? For the record: I am an independent voter who left Republican Party after Bush went into Iraq. Call me woke.
The next time you visit Moscow to audit Putin's wealth, I'd like to travel with you. I've never been to Russia. I would never stoop to the level of calling anyone "woke". In my mind, that is the worst insult that can be applied to anyone.
Unlike you, I actually lived in Russia for 20 years and in another former USSR republic for 13 years. I visited Russia last time 20 years ago, before Putin declared his war on the West in 2007 in Munich (you may want to read up on that). I have close friends and relatives still in Russia, so I know quite a bit about what is going on. I can tell you for a fact that people get arrested for wearing sneakers in colors of Ukrainian flag or for singing a song in Ukrainian language. Nobody arrests those who speaks Russian language in Ukraine. As an American citizen, I would not advise a single American to travel to Russia right now, as any American citizen can become a bargaining chip in the trade for Russians convicted in US or Europe for the targeted assassinations of political opponents or for hacking into American banks. Now, to audits of Putin's assets. In 1990es, St. Petersburg city council conducted audit of what happened to the raw materials that Putin was responsible to exchange for food when people in the city were starving after collapse of the USSR. The woman who led this audit (university professor) had to leave city in a hurry and spent the rest of her life in hut in the remote village. Her friend who was supporting the audit was assassinated and many witnesses disappeared or died suddenly. The raw materials were about $270 million worth. Another critic of Putin who explain to the shocked public why apartment builidings exploded in 1999 in 3 cities including Moscow, was poisoned with radioactive polonium in London in a restaurant. Keep talking about Ukrainian mafia.
@THG- The same country whose dictator closed the churches and imprisoned the priests? THAT conservative and deeply Christian nation?
For Christians, it would be very educational to learn how Kyiv Patriarchy was annexed by Moscovian tsars in 15th-17th centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Church_of_Ukraine
Churches that were closed belonged to the Moscow Patriarchy. The best analogy to Moscow Patriarchy are mosques in Iran where government and religion have merged. The head of Russian Patriarchy is a former KGB officer. Would you want your churches controlled by the country that occupied 20% of your territory?
Germany is closing mosques that spew anti-German propaganda. Is it wrong? Ukraine is doing the same, except the propaganda coming out of Russian churches denies Ukrainians their language and their right to have their own country.
Silly. Simple criminals looting the booty.
“The public can now see that the department functions, in part, as a patronage scheme for left-wing ideologies.”
I’m confident that vast swaths of our federal government function as patronage schemes.
In part?
I wonder how much of the left's ideological hegemony during the Great Awokening was astroturfed with taxpayer funds.
I'd bet the majority of it was.
Chris, I assume (and hope) that when DOGE identifies something that needs to be cut/canceled there is a process for making the head of the relevant department aware of it and that person actually pulls the trigger (so to speak) to make the cut. If this is the case I would suggest that your description of the process describe it accurately so that the nay sayers continuous crying that Musk is cutting all these things by himself is precluded. If it's not the way it is done, it should be.
Yes, that's how it works, from what I understand. There is a process and requires the leadership to sign off.
As a Veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, and a proud naturalized American. I'm stunned to see how many students don't have basic knowledge after graduating from high school. The indoctrination has no place in public institutions. Not on our taxes. I'm hoping for a big shake of the Department of Education, and once we erect the new one, bring back the learning of hard skills, and foreign languages. I was educated in Romania, and by the time we left high school, most students were polyglots.
What is your point here other than personally attacking the author of the thread?
You are so right. The bureaucracy could so easily win. Think how many fat cats are living the cushy life in and around Washington. They have many many ways of undermining reform. (It is the same in Canada, around Ottawa.) This is a job for years long efforts, not just lightning speed.
This is going to take years. EO can be over turned with the stroke of a pen. We need legislation and some kind of permanent oversight so the Swamp can't start this crap right back up in 4, 8 ,12 years.
Thanks for all you do, Chris.
Thanks for sharing.
DOGE offers promising signs of a return to sanity. Their speed is their advantage: Bureaucrats need to form planning committees, write initial assessment reports, and hold at least three equitably-staffed meetings before they can take any action. DOGE? Review the evidence, then BOOM.
I’m 61 years now and as I think back most of my teachers and university professors were losers and weirdos. Some were brilliant and learned thank goodness but most were out of touch and kind of irrelevant people.
Spot on, Diamond Boy. And over the past few decades, it has only gotten worse.
I agree, ideological capture of teachers
Terry, that’s cool in a nutty way
The quick followup to DOGE findings has to be radical transparency of the names of these ideological programs so those of us fighting to improve student outcomes at the local level can identify and root out those programs in use in local school districts.
Move fast and break things.. it’s hilarious watching the left melt down and defend the indefensible… hopefully the final step is block grants to states and the elimination of the AFT/NEA/DOE corruption apparatus
By the way, my job involves reading the tech media. If you don't read it, you would have no idea how much the tech media midwits hate Elon Musk and are bending every effort to misrepresent and discredit him. They even dumped on the idea of a Mars base.
Now, maybe a Mars base is a walk on the wild side. But so were the moonwalks in their day. The same type of tech media covered those eagerly.
My point is that something has changed in the tech media. Much less spirit of adventure and much more obedience to approved progressive doctrines. If they win, there will be no Mars base even if it is viable.
They may leave school preprogrammed as woke left wing conformists. The commissar has declared Musk bad therefore he is.
Jealousy likely. In the it's technically leaders were libertarians. Now, they are progressives. Hopefully the sane ones or ones who chase money like the IT'S ( Andreasen etc) will prevail
We need a stake in the heart of DoE before the bureaucrats can organize their resistance. Don't just prune it. We've got to raze the place and salt the ground asap or they'll grow back bigger and tougher.
there is zero reason to have the federal government involved in education. It's a state, city and local responsibility as per the Constitution.
Nothing in our current system of education will change in the actual classroom today until there is a giant shift in the colleges training future teachers. These young, vulnerable, idealistic students are brainwashed for 4-6 years in hundreds of schools of (mis)education and the ideology is perpetuated for generations. My classes for my elementary teaching credentials 45 years ago were a complete waste of time back then. I can’t imagine what they are like now! Thank goodness I discovered classical homeschooling for my seven children and continue to teach many many grandchildren.
And folks don’t know how deeply entrenched the left’s ideology is in the classrooms… in science, English, history, theology (in many Catholic schools), guest speakers and assemblies etc. etc. It’s a good start but it’s top-down… gonna take a while to clean the mindset out of the indoctrinated young teachers.
Very well said -
Waste is a sin and simply should be eliminated.
Waste is a sin. I like that. Likewise, for the US to consume more than it produces year after year, spending down our aggregate capital resources in the process, is a sin. A terrible human price was paid to build the modern world, which makes it all the more a sacred duty that we preserve its material foundations.