It’s difficult to catalog the range of visceral emotions I feel as I watch President Trump, Elon Musk, and his team of whiz kids at DOGE dismantle the Deep State, piece by piece. Anger. Joy. Disgust. Grim satisfaction. Schadenfreude.
We’ve known for years that our federal government has been robbing us blind. We’ve felt it in our bones but been unable to prove it, while those who gorge themselves at the public trough — politicians, contractors, media figures, lobbyists, lawyers, NGO execs — become rich beyond most of our wildest dreams. To see all that graft and corruption finally dragged into the light of day, with receipts, is almost more than I can process.
As I write, when I find it hard to express my thoughts, I often turn to narrative. So let me start with a little story, a true story, one I’ve thought of many times in the past two weeks.
Last summer, my wife accompanied me to the Washington, D.C. area, where I was helping conduct a three-day workshop for a group of conservative college kids sponsored by The Leadership Institute. She often comes with me on these trips, now that we’re empty-nesters, especially if I’m going someplace interesting or somewhere she’s never been. Usually my expenses are paid, and all we have to do is buy an extra plane ticket. And since D.C. has always been one of her favorite places to visit, as an ardent American history buff, she was happy to tag along and see some of the sights while I worked during the day and with me at night.
One fine evening, after a rain shower had cooled things down, we decided to go for a walk in the obviously rather affluent neighborhood right behind our upscale hotel in Arlington. Lining the quiet, tree-canopied streets were quite a few stately older homes, several smaller older homes, and whole slew of large, modern, brand-new homes, some still under construction.
Out of curiosity, my wife pulled up Zillow on her phone and began looking at home prices, using the function that allows you to see the estimated value of every house in the vicinity all at once. I heard her exclaim, “Oh, my gosh” and looked over her shoulder at the app. Even the oldest, most run down house on the block was valued at over $1.5 million. The larger ones were in the $2–3 million range, with the new homes pushing $4 million.
“Where do all these people get that kind of money?” she asked.
“From us,” I replied.
I understand that’s a bit of a generalization. Some of those homes have been owned by the same people for years and simply appreciated in value. Then again, you can see on Zillow when a home has been sold, and most of the ones we were looking at had changed hands at least once within the last five years.
I also understand that not everyone in D.C. makes his money directly from the federal government. Indeed, most federal employees can’t afford to live in a neighborhood like that, which is why they live far from downtown and commute an hour or more to work. (Back when they used to commute, I mean, before they all started working from home — something else Trump is putting an end to.)
And yes, it’s true that other metro areas, like San Francisco and Chicago, are also very expensive, because they have lucrative industries that draw people to them. In the Bay Area, for example, you have Big Tech, which seems to be creating new millionaires every day. People who are interested in the technology field, and who want to make a lot of money, are drawn to the area.
That’s not to say everyone in the Bay Area works in the tech industry, or that everyone who lives there is rich. It’s just that the tech sector is the main driver of the area’s economy and the main reason so many rich people live there. If the tech companies all went away, the economy in the Bay Area would collapse overnight. (That very thing may be starting to happen.)
So what about Washington, D.C., which is nearly as affluent and expensive as San Francisco, if not more so? What is the main industry there? What is the driver of its economy?
You know the answer. It’s the federal government. That’s what draws people to D.C. Not the climate or the food or the history. People looking to make lots of money are drawn there by Big Gov, with its virtually limitless funds. And what is the source of those funds? Why, we are. We the people, the taxpayers of the United States of America. Under our Constitution, the government is essentially us.
Here’s where the schadenfreude comes in.
My wife and I have worked hard all our lives to achieve some level of success. We make a decent living. We’ve lived frugally. We sacrificed to put four kids through college. We haven’t taken on a ton of consumer debt, and we pay our bills on time. We’ve saved and invested.
Now I look at my portfolio and, factoring in the last four years of inflation, I calculate that I may need to work until I’m 72 or older just so we don’t run out of money in retirement. On one level, this is fine. I enjoy what I do, and I’m not actually looking to retire anytime soon. Nor am I complaining about the hard work. I was raised to expect life to be like that. We brought up our children the same way.
But then I stroll through a neighborhood like that one, in (or very near) our nation’s capital, and I see all these people who are making their money — most of them, anyway, directly or indirectly — from the federal government, the government I pay taxes for, and they’re ten times richer than I’ll ever be.
That’s a bitter pill to swallow — that any amount of my hard earned money, however small, goes toward enabling someone else to buy a $4-million home, a home I could never afford if I work until I’m 102.
Then Elon and his wunderkinds come along and show us that we were right all along, that we are being robbed, that the treasury is being plundered, that money — our money — is being funneled to people and places we would never approve, into worthless projects that, besides flouting our values, are mostly just money-laundering schemes to help the rich men north of Richmond get even richer.
And then Elon and company begin to turn off the spigot. Suddenly, the trough is no longer filling up. And the Deep State operators and all their cronies and minions panic. They’re being starved. What will they do? What will happen to the value of all those multi-million-dollar homes they’ve purchased with our money?
Hey, maybe in a couple of years I will be able to afford one of those after all.
Image via Pixabay.
As the U.S. Agency for International Development comes under scrutiny for what it’s been spending your money on — something it hasn’t been very forthcoming about before President Donald Trump’s administration made it one of the first targets of its Department of Government Efficiency downsizing initiative — the agency has come under fire for a whole lot of largesse that supported progressive, Democrat causes.
From the small but inexplicable ($32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru) to the larger and more problematic (funding a supposedly independent journalistic non-profit referenced by a CIA analyst whistleblower responsible for catalyzing the first Trump impeachment as a reason to suspect the president of wrongdoing), USAID has had its fingers in plenty of pies it shouldn’t have.
However, what if I told you that USAID played a part in the catastrophic pandemic that helped the Democrats dramatically (and illegally) overhaul election laws — and thus, it could be said, helped steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden?
I know, I know: I sound a bit like a slightly unbalanced Morpheus handing Neo the red pill. Breadcrumb it all back, however, and it begins to make a lot more sense than you’d think.
On Jan. 25, the Central Intelligence Agency announced that it believed the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. While they asserted this with “low confidence,” according to The Wall Street Journal, it was a major shift for an agency that had long refused to take a position in the matter, particularly when most U.S. intelligence agencies favored a natural origin.
The CIA now believes, however, “that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting.”
This comes as a surprise to virtually no one with a functioning brain. The virus most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 was not found naturally near Wuhan, nor was any original host animal found, nor were any bats — the source of that family of coronaviruses — ever found being sold at the wet market supposedly responsible for the outbreak.
There was, meanwhile, an institute of virology hundreds of meters from where the outbreak began. There were numerous safety issues documented there and public evidence of a mishap there in October of 2019, around the time when scientists believe the virus would have begun to spread.
While this can’t be said to be dispositive for a lab leak, the balance of the evidence is pretty clear — and despite their best efforts, even the Chinese Communist Party can’t come up with a plausible theory regarding animal-to-human transfer five years in.
To make matters worse, the research being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was — despite Anthony Fauci’s verbal prestidigitations in denying it — so-called “gain of function” research, which is to say it took viruses (in this case, bat coronaviruses), and looked at ways they could become more transmissible or deadly.
This was done at a research facility where, again, security concerns existed going as far back as 2009. (No, I’m not missing a one somewhere in that number.)
One of the most controversial aspects of the research going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was that some of it was done by EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. non-governmental organization which received millions grants from the government for, among other things, a program known as “PREDICT.”
And here’s where that darned red pill begins to take hold.
From EcoHealth’s website: “In an effort to identify and respond to new zoonotic diseases before they spread to humans, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) established its Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) program. The EPT program consists of four projects: PREDICT, RESPOND, IDENTIFY, and PREVENT. The PREDICT project seeks to identify new emerging infectious diseases that could become a threat to human health. PREDICT partners locate their research in geographic ‘hotspots’ and focus on wildlife that are most likely to carry zoonotic diseases – animals such as bats, rodents, and nonhuman primates.” [Emphasis ours.]
Not only that, documents show that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases knew about both the bat coronavirus gain of function research EcoHealth Alliance was doing and the safety risks at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
USAID and the U.S. government continued to fund their work. And while there’s no evidence that EcoHealth Alliance specifically worked on the virus that intelligence services now believe leaked from the lab. What is known is that USAID continued the spigot of funding and refused to raise alarms publicly about the WIV.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump was riding a strong economy and, despite the aforementioned impeachment over Ukraine funding (which seems positively quaint now), seemed in good shape to win re-election.
All of a sudden, he was taking the blame for both not shutting the country down hard enough and for the economic effects of a country shut down pretty darn hard.
Any mention of the “China virus” — as to emphasize its origins and curious fact it had originated from the same city where it just so happened bat coronaviruses were studied at a major research facility — was deemed to be racist and downplaying the origins of the virus, which we were told ad nauseam were completely, totally, absolutely the result of natural spillover from bats. Shut your trap about that pesky WIV, or EcoHealth Alliance — you conspiracy theorist!
Election rules were changed en masse, often illegally. Mail-in voting became the norm. Soon, low-information voters were being served ballots on a platter at the same time they were being told their president was a quack who believed injecting bleach into your veins would kill the virus. (As opposed to the very scientific prophylactic of wearing flimsy disposable masks, which would absolutely stop things if you just wore like six of them, and put on a face-shield, too.)
And, who would have thought: Joe Biden won! Fair and square, too — no thumbs on the scale, nosiree. The Freest and Fairest Election Ever™.
Mind you, Biden was clearly unable to do the job mentally when he was elected, just as much as he was when he was kicked to the curb for Kamala Harris last summer. The media certainly helped him over the finish line with that. He did no better on containing COVID — and arguably did far worse — than Donald Trump did. The national press covered for that, too.
That doesn’t erase the fact that a very predictable lab leak from an institution which received USAID funding through EcoHealth Alliance upended the 2020 election and allowed all of this to happen. Trump took all the blame, including for not discounting the lab-leak theory.
Meanwhile, a phalanx of U.S. government organizations — USAID among them — washed their hands of the responsibility of not just facilitating gain of function research, but doing it at an institution they should have blown the whistle on a decade prior. They shut up and pointed their fingers at the president, then propped up a senescent puppet.
No, that’s not stuffing the ballot boxes or hacking voting machines or any crazy notion like that. It’s stealing an election the good ol’ fashioned way: by massive deceit. And it was all subsidized by your tax dollars.
We’re now being told to swallow the blue pill: USAID, the Democrats tell us, is nothing more than an aid organization helping the poorest of the poor lift themselves out of destitution. EcoHealth Alliance? Wuhan Institute of Virology? What are those? Crazy talk.
Or, swallow that red pill and realize that, far from its original mission, USAID has become a taxpayer-to-NGO money transfer service that played a role — and however small or large you want to believe that role is, it’s still a role — in creating the conditions for upending the 2020 election, among other outrages.
Your dollars, your choice, America. I’d like to think you deserve the truth.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.[SOURCE]
One person was killed and at least seven people were injured after a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on Wednesday morning, the authorities said, on the same day that a man drove a truck through a crowd in New Orleans, killing at least 15 people.
Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said during a news conference that the authorities “believe this to be an isolated incident” but have not yet ruled out a connection to the Wednesday morning attack in New Orleans.
“There is no further threat to the community,” Sheriff McMahill said. Sheriff McMahill. As of Wednesday afternoon, there was no indication the explosion was connected to ISIS, which President Biden said inspired the New Orleans attack, but the investigation remains ongoing, he said.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Jeremy Schwartz, the acting F.B.I. special agent in charge in Las Vegas, said the agency is investigating whether the explosion “was an act of terrorism or not.”
“I know everybody’s interested in that word and trying to see if we can say, ‘Hey this is a terrorist attack,” Mr. Schwartz said. “That is our goal, and that’s what we’re trying to do”
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department received a report of an explosion at about 8:40 a.m. local time at the Trump Hotel.
Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, said in a statement on X that “the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck” and said the vehicle was functioning properly.
Police were told that a 2024 Cybertruck “pulled up to the last entrance doors of the hotel,” Sheriff McMahill said earlier at a news conference.
The driver was the only person in the truck, Mr. McMahill said, and was killed inside the vehicle. At least seven others were reported to have sustained minor injuries.
Sheriff McMahill said the authorities found gas canisters, camp fuel canisters and large firework mortars in the back of the truck. It was unclear how they were ignited, Sheriff McMahill said.
The authorities said that the truck was rented in Colorado using Turo, the same car rental app used in the New Orleans attack. The authorities were able to trace the car back to Colorado using video footage captured at charging stations, Sheriff McMahill said.
The truck arrived in Las Vegas at around 7:30 a.m. local time, Sheriff McMahill said, and went up and down Las Vegas Boulevard before immediately pulling into the Trump Towers.
Videos posted to social media showed what appeared to be a Tesla Cybertruck engulfed in flames just outside a hotel’s lobby entrance doors. Other social media posts showed what appeared to be a line of people being led out of the building.
“Earlier today, a reported electric vehicle fire occurred in the porte cochère of Trump Las Vegas,” Eric Trump, Donald J. Trump’s son and a leader of the Trump Organization, said in a statement on X. “The safety and well-being of our guests and staff remain our top priority.”
The same message was posted by the Trump Las Vegas’s social media account. People who were staying at the hotel said they were evacuated because of the fire.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Oscar Terol, who was visiting the United States from Barcelona, said that he was walking toward the hotel entrance with his wife when he stopped at a food cart right before the explosion occurred. “Those 10 seconds were the difference,” he said.
He and his wife stumbled backward and Mr. Terol saw a vehicle with flames and an array of colors shooting out of it that he assumed were fireworks.
Todd Hansen was on the 27th floor of the hotel when he said he heard a series of loud popping sounds. He took the elevator down to a waiting area, where he saw smoke and sprinklers on in the driveway outside of the hotel entrance.
“The elevator area was full of people,” Mr. Hansen said. “They would not let you out of the elevator area and into the lobby.” He went back to his room to alert his wife and they were both evacuated when they returned downstairs, he added.
Shir Poli, of San Antonio, said that he had noticed a gas-like smell on the floor and elevator. He managed to take his luggage with him as evacuations were underway.
Kerri Ford, of Wisconsin, said she had left her room for a cup of coffee when she was told to leave the building. She was set to be married on Wednesday afternoon, and her wedding dress and marriage license were left in the room.
“We didn’t know there was anything going on,” Ms. Ford said. “We just happened to come down for coffee and they’re like, ‘You have to evacuate.’”
The incident comes as Mr. Musk has cultivated a close and highly public relationship with President-elect Donald J. Trump. Mr. Musk has been using a cottage at Mar-a-Lago that Mr. Trump converted into a members-only club, providing easy access. In November, Mr. Trump tapped the tech billionaire to help lead a new Department of Government Efficiency.
And federal filings revealed in December showed that Mr. Musk had spent more than $250 million in the final months of the presidential campaign to help Mr. Trump win the White House.
The Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, on Fashion Show Drive, has nearly 1,300 suites and is 64 stories, according to the Trump Hotels website.
Pashtana Usufzy reported from Las Vegas and Emmett Lindner reported from New York. [SOURCE]
