Namely, amid all the caterwauling and bitching about the fact that Elon Musk and his team of young savants at DOGE who are doing an audit – all of this stuff they’re screaming about right now is just an audit, you know – of wasteful and abusive federal spending at agencies like USAID, Sen. John Kennedy noted in a speech last night that DOGE is actually finding such waste.
Perhaps worse waste than people imagined. Though you really lack imagination if this stuff shocks you.
We know that the federal government has been pissing away money on projects that do far more harm than good. We’ve known it all our adult lives.
The details are certainly shocking, and the utter lack of controls on how the money is spent at a place like USAID, when members of Congress have no idea about these line items, is pretty discouraging.
What it tells you is the audit that Musk and DOGE are doing is probably 90 years overdue, and the amount of money utterly set on fire by this government constitutes the worst fiscal crime in world history.
And yet, as Kennedy notes, the Democrats on Capitol Hill are screeching about whether Musk and DOGE have the power to fire people or stop expenditures – and “who elected Elon Musk?”
Really? This is what you want to fight about? You’re angry about the chain of command here, when it’s obvious that all of this is flowing down from the White House when Donald Trump made specific promises during the campaign that an audit like this was coming?
This is what the American people have been asking for, really for decades. It’s finally happening, and the rot being uncovered is staggering, if not surprising.
Kennedy doesn’t come out and say this, but I will: the Democrats are now branding themselves as the party of that rot. They’ve sent their dumbest Congresscritters out to microphones to bitch and scream uncontrollably over the dissolution of programs and agencies that less than 20 percent of the public would opt to continue at a time when the federal budget is $2 trillion in the red.
To say they’re lacking in leadership is a woefully insufficient statement.
Our regular readers have seen me discuss revivalism as an improvement on conservatism, and maybe this is a good opportunity to run through the theory once again. In my book The Revivalist Manifesto, one major theme is that we’ve had three major political eras in American history, the third of which began in 1932 and was coming to an end.
I say “was coming to an end,” because it did come to an end in November of last year with that election.
That third era was a Democrat era. It was marked by big government, the welfare and regulatory states, globalist adventurism and a bunch of other things – among them the rise of mass media as a means of control over public opinion, and so on.
A lot of parts had been falling off that machine even before Trump’s victory. Now, it’s pretty obvious the whole thing is junked. And in this fourth era which has just begun, things are very different.
In all of the previous eras, what you’ve seen is a 20-year collapse of the out-of-power party which allows the in-power party to set the agenda and tone for American politics. So for example, when Thomas Jefferson crushed John Adams in the 1800 presidential election, Adams’ Federalist Party essentially disintegrated and was no longer a viable opposition to what was then called the Democratic-Republican party, or the Democrats. But when their control collapsed and Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, putting the Republicans on the map, the Democrats started a civil war and paid such a price that they didn’t win a presidential election until 1884; by then Democrat politics, at least in the North, wasn’t all that much different from a fundamental statement of policy than was Republican politics.
And that was true after the second era, which Republicans controlled, collapsed with the 1932 election. The GOP didn’t manage to retake the White House until 1952, and when they did it was with Dwight D. Eisenhower who had absolutely no interest in dismantling any of the New Deal policies that Franklin D. Roosevelt had put in place to cement that era.
It’s beginning to look a whole lot like today’s Democrat Party is the GOP of the 1930’s – discredited, screechy, out of ideas and powerless to stop the other side – or even to convince the public why the other side ought to be stopped.
That’s what the wilderness looks like.
There’s a poll out in the last few days which has the Democrat Party underwater on approval 31-57. With men, the approval rate is around 20. I’d include a link, but I saw it last night on one of the news channels and I don’t feel like researching it. Those numbers are extinction-level problematic for the Democrats, because they tell you their base has been broken. Democrats are in lockstep with their party. They’ve always had 45 percent of the public captured. Now it’s 31?
And what are they doing differently? What lessons are they learning?
Kennedy does a really nice job in bringing the conversation back to exactly what they don’t want to talk about, which is the waste, fraud and abuse the Democrats are protecting by screeching about what powers Musk has as a designee of the President to audit these agencies.