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I’m Enjoying the Winning, but…
I want it to be durable. What Trump can do with an executive order, the next president can in large part undo with an executive order. I hope there is an effort underway to persuade Congress to implement these actions into law, so that they won’t be subject to the whims of the next chief executive.
I believe the progressive project has been dealt a serious blow and will not recover quickly. Millions of Americans who let leftist bullies frighten them from saying what they knew to be true — that the emperor was sporting an outfit from the Bianca Censori Collection — are now emboldened; millions more who just accepted the fabricated mainstream narrative are coming to understand just how deep the gaslit rabbit hole goes.
Learning that the tax you’ve paid for your entire working life, every single dollar, has been spent, along with millions more, entirely in the noble cause of advancing DEI in Serbia or trans-activism in Guatemala, has a way of concentrating your mind wonderfully.
We’re winning. Let’s keep winning. And let’s pass laws the way the founders intended, to make these wins secure and lasting.
Published in Politics
And let’s keep in mind that the Democrats could, and, by historical standards, should, flip the House in the off-year.
How long before Trump starts the next act? Nicole Shanahan has already said she will personally fund challenges to officials who vote against RFK, Jr. She created her “first meme” showing primaries everywhere. At some point, Trump has to join in and point out exactly what you’ve said: All his achievements can be undone by EO unless Congress-critters do their part. The mid-terms will determine whether the fraud and the waste continue.
I’ve heard a few GOP congressmen on Just the News say they are trying to codify Trumps EO’s into law. As one of them said, it takes time, but he believes they may be able make some progress. We can only do what we can do and that’s stay on them about it.
Indeed, Part 2 or Part 3 of the project needs to be a way to insure this mess doesn’t happen again.
You need a *mechanism*.
Actually, multiple mechanisms. One isn’t enough.
The mechanisms currently in place incentivize fraud and waste in a big way. So we need the opposite of that.
Some possibilities:
That sort of thing.
As just a start – campaign ads for the midterms are hopefully in the works (and maybe start advertising a year from now and keep the ads running combined with an aggressive voter registration effort) showing screaming and howling Democrat members of Congress and to the right side of the screen, a text scroll of all the DEI, trans, and funds to terrorist groups, etc., etc., that USAID was delivering
Narration:
“This is how Democrats have been spending your tax dollars. DEI programs, drag queen shows, a transgender opera in Latin America, millions of dollars for condoms for Hamas terrorists, and money for other terrorist groups in the Middle East (photo of terrorists in a USAID tent). Your tax money paid for all of this. (pause)
But that’s not why these Democrats are angry. Democrats are angry that they got caught funding all this with your money. They were hoping you wouldn’t find out.
There is a way to put a stop to this and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
VOTE REPUBLICAN
(additional text fades in)
…FOR A CHANGE”
Other ads to concentrate on the eradication of illegal alien criminals, and unleashing the energy sector…
It is not enough to pare back the more obvious excesses of the beast. People need to see a better, more secure personal future in are era of government downsizing. Cute in federal spending means some people lose jobs. Unless the economy is growing new jobs, that is a political and social problem.
Democrats may be forced to decrease the volume on allegations of racism, climate doom and the wonders of 57 sexual identities and go back to spewing far more effective rhetoric about funding health care, daycare, income supplements etc. which is much more conducive to electoral victory.
Even if Trump cuts federal spending by some significant amount, restores our defense posture, tames global villains and sparks an unprecedented level of economic growth, there is the danger that many will say, gee, we can now afford to have the government do all that we ever wanted.
George Bush ’41 was custodian of the Reagan economy and made America safer than ever. Ross Perot said now we can afford to streamline government and Bill Clintonsaid we can afford to do more, especially health care. Bush lacked “the vision thing” and lost.
Unless winning also involves healthy changes in ideology, expectations and a broadly shared, sound vision of government in a free society, all gains can be fleeting.
The way I’ve put it for years, is that once someone like a Trump gets the economy going better, you’ll have people who think they can just swap in someone like an FJB and everything will keep going smoothly AND they’ll get more free stuff.
Eliminate Congressional Constituent Services by which members of Congress seek favors from Administrative agencies on behalf of individual constituents.
It’s been a long time but IIRC, California once had a surplus and a “rainy day fund”. Exactly as you say, the progressives claimed that since “we have the money”, any refusal to spend it to help people is just “mean-spirited”. I’ve always wondered if they are economically ignorant or if they were counting on the principle that nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program.
Also hope the EOs can be put in legislation. But even if not he will likely reduce spending (i.e. flushing billions of our dollars down the drain) by many times what we could have hoped for under any other President.
This is going to take a grass roots campaign the size of a presidential campaign to pressure Congress to do the right thing. Turning Point USA and others will need to take names and kick butts.
USAID bought American soft power to go with its hard power. Competently or not, that’s what it did.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other-times-usaid-pretended-to-be-an-intelligence-agency/
With USAID gone what other instruments should the US use to achieve these ends? Soft power costs less to use than hard power, so should the US set up another ‘purer’ institution to encourage/support/shape/change society and politics in target countries, or is it back to full on CIA Allende coups and the Age of Generals?
imo the US needs both options. One produced (finally) a quisling administration in Syria, the other is producing one in Lebanon.
Why do you think USAID is gone? I thought the plan was to flush out the inappropriate stuff and then start it up again. There are some MAGAtroids on Twitter who think it’s all bad, but I don’t know that that is Trump’s or Musk’s plan.
“Soft power” is a silly concept. I first heard the term when it was used by the EU. It is meaningless unless backed by “hard power”.
You don’t think money is power?
You give money. The recipient takes it and does what he wants with it in opposition to your intentions. What changes his mind other than “hard power”? So, no, money is not hard power.
When it comes to “competence” count me in the “…or not” side of the proposition of how USAID performed. The intelligence agencies have been incompetently run for quite some time (when they weren’t trying to undermine a duly-elected president with a concocted Russian disinformation project) and especially in the last 4 years when a brain-dead POTUS thought it wise to extract Americans and the military from Afghanistan by September 11th – the date celebrated by Islamists wishing to annihilate America and leave billions of dollars of military weaponry, vehicles and technology for the Taliban. This was the same administration that unleashed the DOJ and FBI to arrest and surveil law-abiding US citizens and not terrorists and saboteurs who came across the southern border and then disappeared.
USAID is not necessary to run counter intelligence programs or psy-ops. More sophisticated technology tools exist today that, when properly used, can undermine the authority of adversarial nations hell-bent on spreading terror. They just haven’t been tried. Aiding Middle Eastern terrorists and their affiliates with USAID money was either done through glaring incompetence or was intentional by those sympathetic with undermining the State of Israel, some of whom had the ear of decision-makers in the State Department, the Oval Office, and the intelligence community. Thankfully Blinken and Jake Sullivan no longer have security clearances. Condoms for Hamas that were filled with helium and used to send IEDs over the border to Israel is just one example of sheer incompetence or intention.
It should be noted that USAID didn’t have a program to purchase pagers for terrorist organizations and their Iranian funders that could be blown up remotely. Mossad came up with that gem, and there is so much that the CIA and other agencies can learn from an intelligence agency that actually practices their craft intelligently rather than staging transgender operas or peddling other ridiculous transgender or DEI programs…or the failed social media effort in Cuba you cited.
The money laundering, kickbacks, and ideological slanting of the news to undermine a sitting US president and his administration are reason enough to eliminate this agency.
It’s not actually being eliminated but moved into the State Dept where people like Marco Rubio can keep a closer eye on it, right?
The foreign aid aspects are being preserved – food for famine stricken regions, medical supplies for disaster relief, etc. All the silly crud is being eliminated.
China’s Belt and Road program is a way of exerting soft power. If countries get indebted to China, they are more willing to adopt policies pleasing to China. The hard power can theoretically be exercised to collect debts from countries that threaten to renege on their obligations, but a lot of power is exercised without it coming to that. It’s not silly or meaningless.
The United States conquered the Indian nations of North America using a lot of soft power. In an infamous letter to William H. Harrison, President Jefferson urged getting the Indians in debt so that in order to pay off their debts, they’d be willing to make large land cessions. There were some treaty negotiations where the treaty commissioners had trouble getting the Indians to sign away land in the quantities they wanted, so sometimes pulled out the threat of military action. But it wasn’t usually necessary. The fact that Indians were addicted to a system of loans that they sometimes had trouble paying back was usually enough to get them to agree.
Yesterday there was news that the Baltic countries had finally set up their electrical energy infrastructure so that they no longer needed to buy electricity from Russia. The Russia shills on Twitter were quite upset by that, judging by the amount of name-calling and criticism of the Baltics for being so stupid as to forgo cheap electricity from Russia in favor of more expensive European electricity. But it was a way for the Baltics to resist the soft power of Russia.
Or to put it another way…a few cubicles will be added to Foggy Bottom but the USAID office itself will be shut down for a time until it is repurposed.
You have made my point. In every case you mentioned the hard power was there as an enforcement mechanism. “Soft power” just means “I’m being nice, but I don’t have to be.” As I heard one military guy say, “If you are not capable of blinding, swift violence, your aren’t peaceful you’re just harmless.”
I don’t have a problem with foreign aid in principle.
I do have a problem with unaccountable federal agencies colluding with the press and with leftist NGOs to push a noxious cultural and political agenda. I have a problem with such organizations enriching well connected cronies.
I’ve seen enough evidence of that to justify shutting it down until the mess gets sorted out.
It’s soft power. I certainly exercised it as power in my job in order to get things done my way (which coincidentally was the best way) and I’m not talking about supervisor-employee relationships or contractual relationships.
It wasn’t always used as an enforcement mechanism, although the power is less soft when/if it’s pulled out. If you’re creating enforceable obligations, then yes, you need an enforcement mechanism, but the power to withdraw money in the future is also a mechanism that doesn’t rely on any kind of violent force.
Take the funding of Politico which allegedly took place. Does it rely on any kind of military force? Of course not. But if Politico published things that displeased the government, the power of the government to quit sending money to Politico would be an incentive not to publish too much that displeased the government.
No, that’s not what it means. Sometimes it can mean that, but it hardly ever just means that. Even humanitarian aid isn’t always that innocuous.
Your military guy’s statement is off topic.
That too. But it’s going to be part of the State Department now, not a separate agency called USAID.
Jordan Peterson says something similar.
This view is too narrow. There must be a comprehensive audit of federal funds going to states so that campaigns for conservative Governor and Congressional candidates can be funded to defeat those who use this federal spending going to states to gain their political offices. This issue is hot right now and should be prominently at the forefront in the New York Republican campaign to replace Elise Stefanik in the House of Representatives.
Hopefully the Republican message will be, “Keep us in office if you want stability.”
We are getting a good look at how the CIA and the State Department have mis-used our tax dollars to promote Leftist campaigns in foreign nations. A better option for these funds would be to strengthen our Navy so that we can insure the trade lanes stay open. Otherwise, efforts to strengthen ground military defense in Panama, Greenland, and other land based military capability will be less effective.