Category Archives: Uncategorized

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The Broadside | The Absurd, Outrageous Spending Exposed by DOGE

Sorry for the lack posting. I’m finally sitting up straight again after battling some kind of virus for the past two weeks.

Sheesh.

In that time, I’ve been watching DOGE and I’ve got thoughts. First, let’s look at some of the expenditures that the DOGE boys have exposed.

  • $70,000 for the production of a “DEI musical” in Ireland
  • $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia
  • $2,000,000 for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala
  • $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru
  • Hundreds of millions to support “irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan,” benefiting the Taliban
  • $40,000,000 to fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which gifted the world with the COVID virus

It’s enough to make you choke on your iced triple grande vanilla americano. As if those aren’t enough to get your blood boiling, there’s these:

One has to wonder who authorizes largesse like this. There’s two parts to it: cost and purpose. So, “$70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland” may not sound like a lot (cost) but who decided we needed to export financial support for a woke musical in Ireland (purpose)?

We are $36 TRILLION in debt. And now we know why and it’s not just “overspending.” It’s reckless, unchecked, unaccountable spending on things that no one voted for spending on.

Leftists in government agencies can put their mitts on all that money that our government takes from us, the taxpayers, and can seemingly spread it out to whatever pet projects they favor.

Our government is like a gigantic slush fund.

It’s enraging. But it’s necessary to expose what’s going on under the covers. This is how Trump and Musk galvanize public opinion, which puts pressure on congress to support the efforts, creating a virtuous cycle.

Trump recognizes, as Ronald Reagan did, the importance of galvanizing American public opinion as an integral part of carrying out his agenda. By inflaming the public, he puts pressure on the craven Congress to go along with his efforts to enact sweeping changes that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to achieve.

Of course, Trump has also forced the Democrats to oppose these cuts.

Democrats cannot have it both ways. They are either against waste and fraud sucking up taxpayer dollars, or they are for it.

And their relentless attacks on Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency make it clear which side they’re on. Spoiler alert: It’s not the side of the taxpayer.

Resistance to DOGE is coming from many quarters. Loopy Democrats like Maxine Waters, who is vowing to “fight!” (what exactly?); ambitious radicals like Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is irate that her pet project, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, may be gutted. It is ironic that Warren is howling about Musk being “unaccountable” when her main achievement in the Senate was the creation of a bureau that answers to no one.

Musk is aiming to eliminate 2 TRILLION dollars from government spending in two years. And it’s about time.

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The Broadside | Trump Plaza in Gaza-Lago

I predicted here that the Kansas City Chiefs would beat the Philadelphia Eagles by six points in Super Bowl LIX. If the Chiefs had shown up, that may have happened. They kept Saquon Barkley in check, but the Eagles shut down any Chiefs offense and sacked Mahomes six times. That must be the “six” I sensed in my prediction.

Did you know the flu is going around? I had no idea until it flattened me last week. I hope all of you are staying well.

Just when you think Trump can’t shock you with something new.

The U.S. will “take over the Gaza Strip,” level it and rebuild the area, President Donald Trump said during a press conference Tuesday evening after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.

Wut?

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Trump said Tuesday evening in a joint press conference with Netanyahu. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous, unexplored bombs and other weapons on the site.”

“Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area,” he said. “Do a real job. Do something different. Just can’t go back. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for 100 years.”

Even more amazing is that instead of laughing off the idea, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu embraced it.

Netanyahu, when also asked about the Gaza Strip, reiterated to the media that he has three goals, one of which is to “make sure that Gaza never poses a threat to Israel again.”

“President Trump is taking it to a much higher level,” the Israeli leader said. “He sees a different – he sees a different future for that piece of land that has been the focus of so much terrorism, so much, so many attacks against us, so many, so many trials and so many tribulations. He has a different idea, and I think it’s worth paying attention to this.”

It’s so radical, it might work.

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The Broadside | I Mean It: The Democrat Party Must Be Outlawed

If you’ve read my stuff for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m sharply critical of the Democrat party and have only gotten more so over the intervening four years in the middle of Trump’s two-term presidency. (I’m thankful for that hiatus, but that’s a story for another post.)

I’ve gotten to the point where a year ago I wrote that The “Democratic” Party Should be Outlawed. That post was about, you guessed it, illegal immigration. In another post, I waxed eloquent and quoted from John Hinderaker:

We have no duty to conform. In fact, it is our duty to not just resist, but to actively reject any cooperation with Democrats.

More fundamentally, the Democratic Party is now illegitimate. We should stop treating it as a normal political organization. We conservatives have played by the rules, trying to hold our country together in the face of increasingly radical and irrational conduct from our political foes. Those days should be gone. The Democratic Party is now exposed as the enemy of freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and should be treated accordingly.

Correct. And to “treat it accordingly” is to abolish it, make it illegal to reconstitute, and to politically exile its members.

As I said here, “The Democrat party is an extremely corrupt organization both spiritually and politically. It is anti-Christian, anti-American, irrational, and degenerate. I don’t believe confessing Christians can authentically follow Christ yet vote Democrat.”

You won’t be surprised, then, when I say that the Democrats have learned nothing from the beat-down they got in the 2024 election and, in fact, have doubled down on their absurdities, confirming that nothing but total political and legal annihilation is necessary. It must be abolished as a political entity and its political ideology made illegal.

Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media:

After losing an election because the American electorate thought that the Democratic Party had lost its way on every front — especially when it came to radicalism — the Dems elected Minnesota’s Ken Martin to be its new helmsman. Nothing says, “We understand the concerns of regular Americans in flyover country,” like choosing a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party from the state that’s given us Keith Ellison and Ilhan Omar. 

It’s true that the Dems are commies now, but most of them like to be coy about it. The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is one big communist freak flag-flying festival. Once the word “labor” is added to a political party’s name, Karl Marx is allowed a play date in Hell. 

For most of my 40-plus years of conservative political activism, the Democratic National Committee was a well-oiled political machine to be feared. The Democrats were brilliant at playing the long game, always being several steps ahead of the Republicans, even when the Republicans were winning. 

Count the immediately past and present DNC hierarchy among the many people that Trump has broken. 

And Robert Spencer, too:

The Democrats have just had their annual winter meeting, and you’d think that after all the losses they’ve suffered, they would have seized the opportunity to make a course correction. The American people have let them know in no uncertain terms that they’ve had enough of what they’re selling, and yet their only response has been to promise to sell more of it.

On Saturday, I wrote here about their selection of far-left Trump hater Ken Martin as the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, but one of the DNC vice chairs makes Martin look as if he walks around wearing a MAGA hat. The Dems have chosen as one of their primary front beings none other than David Hogg, the arrogant and self-infatuated young far-leftist who shot to fame in 2018 after being inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida when a deranged former student murdered seventeen people there.

As Matt Margolis noted, Hogg is “that kid who earned notoriety after the Parkland school shooting back in 2018, whose 15 minutes of fame expired years ago,” but who “just won’t go away.” Ever since the shooting, Hogg has become a vocal and energetic advocate for disarming Americans in the face of rising crime and Democrat mayors who care little or nothing for the safety and well-being of their constituents. But Hogg isn’t content simply with leaving Americans defenseless in an increasingly dangerous environment.

24-year-old left-wing activist David Hogg is a gun control advocate and co-founder of March for Our Lives, a gun control group that was formed after the Parkland school shooting in 2018, which he survived. He has nothing to offer the sinking USS DNC except more extremism.

When I say they’ve doubled down on absurdities, I mean it. Just watch.

Finally, Bonchie at Red State:

That pretty much brings us to the current day. As far as I can tell, Hogg has never held a real job, and none of his activism has ever added up to anything but losing elections. His home state of Florida has become solidly red, and we all know how the national elections in 2024 turned out. In other words, Hogg appears to be the least qualified, least accomplished DNC official in history, and yet, Democrats saw his record and thought, “Let’s make him one of our leaders.”

It’s astonishing when you think about it. As I said at the beginning of this piece, this is a party with a death wish. If anyone thought, and some more moderate Democrats presumably did, that there would be a course correction, they were incredibly wrong. Not only has there not been a course correction, but the party’s leaders are going further into woke insanity, making it the very core of their messaging and identity. 

Notably, many of us who comment on politics said this would happen. You can’t simply flip a switch and change the base of a political party, no matter how destructive and irrational it may be. The Democratic Party has long been inundated by radicals who believe gender ideology and communism are the answers to all the world’s ills. Those people weren’t going to have an epiphany just because they got their clocks cleaned in 2024. They were always going to double down, which is why you don’t feed the alligator in the first place. The Democrat establishment did so by elevating the David Hoggs and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs of the world, and now they are being consumed. 

To be clear, I’m not advocating for the death of the Democrat party because they’re a clown show dealing in absurdities. If that was all it was, it might be harmless. I’m advocating for the demise of the Democrat party because of the harm it does to our nation and to our people.

It can’t be saved. It must be abolished.

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The Broadside | No, We Are Not a Nation of Immigrants

One of my pet peeves—hmm, correction—one of my deeply held frustrations with the ruling class has been their refusal to address the invasion over our southern border for decades. It’s not just been the Democrats, although they have exacerbated the problem through their anti-American hostility, while the Republicans just ignored the problem.

Fortunately, President Donald J. Trump, who just won his third election and has been sworn into office for the second time, is wasting no time in closing the border and deporting illegal aliens at a record pace.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, taking directions from President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, have arrested over 2,500 illegal immigrants since Trump was sworn into office last Monday.

One of the arguments made by Dilutionists (those who want to dilute the unity of American culture by importing unvetted hordes of third-world welfare cases into the country) is the “but, we’re a nation of immigrants.” In fact, Vice-President J.D. Vance faced off with Margaret Brennan, the propagandist of “Face the Nation” on CBS Sunday morning.

At 3:57 in the video below (cued to that time), after JD Vance says he doesn’t know why we’d allow a person born to parents living temporarily in the US to be automatically conferred US citizenship since there’s no other nation that does that, Brennan replies, “Well, this is a country founded by immigrants,” and gives him a wry “gotcha” smile.

His response wiped the smile off her face. “Just because we were founded by immigrants doesn’t mean that 240 years later, we have to have the dumbest immigration policy in the world.”

Exactly. We were founded by some immigrants. So?

In a terrific article at The Federalist, Brianna Lyman dismantles that argument.

Britain began establishing the 13 original colonies in the early 1600’s. Over the next century or so, hundreds of thousands of Brits moved to the British colonies that were established by settlers — not immigrants. There was no “nation” being immigrated to by the first settlers. The Brits didn’t come to America to join a pre-existing country. It was just land. There were no laws, borders, maps, or written language. The British settlers came to uncharted land to establish colonies under British rule. They were entrepreneurs building this nation from scratch, not immigrants joining a pre-existing nation.

[…]

America was never just a multicultural experiment that began with and requires an endless influx of immigrants (both legal and illegal) to sustain itself. The settlers were not a hodge-podge of random cultures and religions and languages and customs. America was founded by Anglo Protestants who pulled ideas of liberty and independence from Anglo-liberalism, which grounded itself in the idea of equality, freedom, and government controlled by the people (it was most commonly associated with thinkers like John Locke). These settlers forged a new nation, instituted customs, traditions, and a national identity.

And our Founders understood the importance of a national identity, with Thomas Jefferson writing in 1776 that while he is “for extending the right of suffrage (or in other words the right of a citizen) to all who had a permanent intention of living in the country … Whoever intends to live in a country must wish that country well, and has a natural right of assisting in the preservation of it.”

In simpler terms, assimilation was a requirement of anyone coming to America.

But what exactly is to be preserved or assimilated into if the left is correct in that America was “founded” by immigrants and therefore is just a nation of immigrants? Such a premise presupposes that we are merely an ever-changing mixture of the dominant immigrant groups at any point in time.

Most helpful is Lyman’s distinction between “settlers” and “immigrants.” Immigrants are traveling to an established nation; settlers are traveling to an unsettled land to establish a nation. Immigrants are expected to assimilate into the nation they’re joining, not act like settlers establishing their own distinct culture within the host nation.

Yes, foreigners emigrated to the United States after it had become an established nation, and they still do today. But it should be controlled immigration that protects our unique American culture and values, not an uncontrolled mass invasion of third-world peasants and criminals who burden our nation with the cost of their presence and destroy cultural cohesion.

Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s 27-year-old press secretary, held her first press briefing yesterday and addressed this administration’s attitude toward illegals.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was taking questions during her first press briefing since President Donald Trump returned to the White House last week when she was asked about the mass arrests.

“The 3,500 arrests that ICE (U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement) has made so far since President Trump came back into office. Can you just tell us the numbers? How many have a criminal record versus those who are just in the country illegally,” one reporter asked.

“All of them, because they illegally broke our nation’s laws, and therefore, they are criminals as far as this administration goes,” Leavitt replied. “I know the last administration didn’t see it that way. So it’s a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal, but that’s exactly what they are.”

The reporter then asked if they all have criminal records.

“If they broke our nation’s laws, yes, they are a criminal,” Leavitt said.

More like that, please.

For another great article on immigration from The Federalist, read, “Birthright Citizenship Is A Pernicious Lie That’s Destroying America” by John Daniel Davidson.

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The Broadside | Trump Accomplished More in One Week Than Biden Did in Four Years

I stopped watching the NFL after they started taking knees during the national anthem, but I’m aware of the standings and, just so you know that I’m a well-rounded guy, I was rooting for Buffalo yesterday. But Mahomes and Co. are headed back for their third consecutive Super Bowl to face Philadelphia.

My prediction: Chiefs by 6.

Trump’s only been in office for a week and I already can’t keep up with all the winning.

Deportations. Firings. Pardons. A blizzard of executive orders.

And the Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America.

President Donald Trump moved with dizzying speed during his first week back in power as he began the process of enacting his agenda.

Trump’s aggressive use of presidential power out of the starting gate left some observers stunned and his supporters cheering as he wasted little time delivering on a slew of campaign promises, sometimes in provocative and boundary-testing ways.

Shock and awe, I’d say. Just like the Left does when they’re in power.

Health agencies went quiet after a pause was ordered on external communications. Employees overseeing diversity efforts in the federal workforce were put on leave, with plans to fire them. At least one plane was loaded with undocumented immigrants to whisk them out of the country. Pardons were handed out to nearly every person convicted for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The moves sent shock waves from Washington to the nation’s southern border as Trump’s disruptive agenda came into clearer focus.

That is a perfect description of Trump’s agenda. “Disruptive” in the most positive sense of the word.

Much of the transformation was foretold by the president’s hard-charging campaign, where he railed against former President Joe Biden’s policies and promised a radically different approach, and by a transition period that saw him stock his administration with people viewed as eager to dramatically remake government.

Yet the breadth and the tempo of the changes were remarkable.

Trump only has four years to fix what’s broke, or only two years if Democrats were to retake one or both chambers of Congress in the mid-terms. He needs to move at a blistering pace if any of his larger objectives are going to grab and take root.

I like what I’ve seen so far. He’s adopted the “move fast and break things” mindset of tech companies, which iterate quickly. He came into office with a plan and is rapidly putting it into place.

He’s also reacting quickly to unforeseen developments that threaten his agenda. Over the weekend, Colombia’s socialist president, Gustavo Petro, refused to take two planeloads of deported Columbians. Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, reacted swiftly, threatening to slap 25 percent tariffs on Columbian imports, revoking visas and financial sanctions.

“These measures are just the beginning,” Trump added. “We will not allow the Colombian Government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the Criminals they forced into the United States!”

Less than an hour later, Petro folded. Hardcore.

“Colombian President Gustavo Petro is offering his presidential plane to help repatriate deportees from the US who were set to arrive in the country Sunday morning, the presidency said,” CNN reported.

America is back, baby.

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The Broadside | Donald J. Trump Is Our President

I spent most of the day Monday watching the proceedings of the 60th inaugural featuring President Donald J. Trump, and later that day we hosted a party with about 20 friends to celebrate his return to the White House.

We also celebrated the end of the interminable and disastrous cabal known as the Biden administration, arguably the worst and most corrupt “president” in American history—worse even than Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama. After issuing a slew of pardons and commuting death sentences for thousands of condemned criminals, Biden literally signed last-minute preemptive pardons for his criminal family, preposterously claiming that they had been unfairly targeted and were at risk for revenge from the incoming administration.

Biden wasn’t righting wrongs; he was flipping off American citizens and protecting his cronies on his way out the door as he exonerated Anthony Fauci, Liz Cheney and other political scum who served on the J6 committee. The only upside is that now they can’t plead the Fifth Amendment if they are called to testify. And Congress should get busy putting them under oath to find out what they did and how deeply we are compromised.

All that to say that the word that describes the feeling most of us have is one of “relief.” A couple of our friends said separately to me that that’s how they felt. I certainly feel that. It’s like we’ve been granted a reprieve from the destructive forces that have taken over our most sacred civil institutions like government and education and system of justice.

Certainly, Trump feels like he’s been given a mandate to make America great again.

Trump has wasted no time, hitting the ground running with executive orders that begin to turn the ship of state around. A partial list from the NY Post:

  • Withdraw from the Paris climate accord
  • End all federal cases and investigations of any Trump supporters
  • Revoke protections for transgender troops
  • Pardon about 1,500 people criminally charged in the Jan. 6 attack, while commuting the sentences for six
  • Declare a national emergency at the US-Mexico border
  • Designate drug cartels and Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations
  • Reverse several immigration orders from the Biden administration, including one that narrows deportation priorities to people who commit serious crimes, are deemed national security threats or were stopped at the border
  • Rescind the 2021 Title IX order, which bans discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation in education programs that get federal funding
  • Revoke Biden’s recent removal of Cuba from US state sponsors of terrorism list
  • Order federal employees back to work in office five days a week
  • Direct every governmental department and agency to address the cost-of-living crisis
  • Restore freedom of speech and prevent censorship of free speech
  • End the “weaponization of government against the political adversaries of the previous administration”
  • Impose 25% tariffs on products from Mexico and Canada as of Feb. 1
  • Reverse Biden order requiring 50% of new cars sold in 2030 be EVs
  • Proclaim that there are two biological sexes: male and female
  • End diversity, equity and inclusion programs within federal agencies
  • Establish Department of Government Efficiency
  • Reopen Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration
  • Order attorney general, secretary of state and secretary of homeland security to “take all appropriate action to prioritize” prosecution of illegal aliens who commit crimes
  • Withdraw US from Global Minimum Tax agreement
  • Order the attorney general to pursue the death penalty for killing of a law enforcement officer or any capital crime committed by an illegal immigrant
  • Order the secretaries of commerce and the interior to restart efforts to route water from California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state
  • Withdraw the US from the World Health Organization
  • Order Treasury Department to explore creation of External Revenue Service
  • Revoke security clearances for ex-national security adviser John Bolton and 51 intelligence officials who said Hunter Biden laptop bore “classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation.
  • Declare the border crisis an “invasion” and order the attorney general and secretaries of state and homeland security to “take all appropriate action to repel, repatriate, or remove any alien engaged” in such
  • Formally rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and Alaska’s Mt. Denali to “Mt. McKinley”

There’s more, but that’s a flavor of what he’s doing, and it’s all answering the call from the American people to close our border and end the woke nonsense that has consumed our culture for the last four years (and longer).

Yesterday, he also announced a half-trillion-dollar ($500 billion) investment in AI (Artificial Intelligence) data centers featuring a company called “Stargate” and tech investors Larry Ellison (Oracle CEO), Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) and Masayoshi Son (Softbank CEO). Exactly what its purpose will be remains a bit unclear, but they talked about curing cancer and designing treatments for illnesses that might change your mRNA—which is what the clot shot did for Covid—setting off alarm bells in my mind.

As Ronald Reagan said, “Trust, but verify.”

We’re off to a good start. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to document as the Left tries to cope with all the winning and not be the hypocrites they are.

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The Broadside | It’s Go Time!

I can tell you that I have NEVER been this excited about a Monday as I am today! No, not because it is MLK day, even though that’s a noble moment. No, today marks the end of one of the most radical and destructive administrations in our nation’s history, the end of which I and more than half of America have been waiting for four long years.

Joe Biden, after more than 50 years in Washington, is finally, permanently, leaving office. May he ever be encumbered by his disastrous, fake, and failed [p]residency. His term is one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated on the people of the United States, starting with his sham victory in 2020 through the cabal that ran his brain for four years.

Trump is primed to go full force starting at 12:01 today.

“The American people have given us their trust, and in return, we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history. To implement this historic agenda, I have assembled an all-star cabinet of patriots and visionary reformers for America, and together we will win, win, win for America,” he said before giving a shout out to his cabinet picks.

In addition to undoing Biden’s outrageous Executive Orders, pardoning the vast majority of the citizens in jail over J6, Trump is also going to suspend the security clearances of the 51 intelligence officials who claimed in the face of common sense that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian op.

President-elect Donald Trump, on Day 1, plans to suspend security clearances of the 51 intelligence officials who claimed reporting tied to Hunter Biden’s laptop had “the classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation ahead of the 2020 election, according to a report.

Trump will repeal the clearances of the so-called “Spies Who Lie” as part of a flurry of executive orders he’s expected to sign on his first day back in the Oval Office, Fox News reported, citing a senior administration official familiar with the matter.

[…]

Following the bombshell reporting, a slew of former senior intelligence officers signed a letter alleging the lot of emails “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” without presenting any new evidence.

OK, it’s not prison terms, but at least they’re suffering some consequences for their election interference.

Trump has a lot to do in the next couple of years. We’ve got an economy in shambles, we’ve got disasters on both coasts in North Carolina and California, we’ve been overrun by foreign invaders. Internationally we’re being threatened by China, the Middle East is unstable, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a death spiral, and Iran is nearing nuclear viability.

But Trump is an optimist and has declared that we are entering a new era of American prosperity and growth, a “golden age.” He’s put a great team together with rockstars like Mike Hegseth, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, Mario Rubio, Kristi Noem, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Pam Bondi, and so on.

With a talented team like that, Trump can brag that, “We’re not going to stop winning. We’re going to win like never before.”

I hope so.

I trust so.

May it be so.

Enjoy the day!

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The Broadside | Let Dem Charades Begin!

Confirmation hearings are underway with Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, being first out of the gate. I watched the whole thing yesterday, the first time I’ve sat through an entire Senate hearing. This one was conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He started his opening statement with a strong affirmation of his faith.

Thank you to my incredible wife Jennifer, who has changed my life and been with me throughout this entire process. I love you, sweetheart, and I thank God for you. And as Jenny and I pray together each morning, all glory — regardless of the outcome — belongs to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. His grace and mercy abound each day. May His will be done.

No ambiguous acknowledgement of “God” here. Anyone who has had an encounter with Jesus will readily acknowledge Him. As the hearing went on, it became clear that Hegseth humbly recognized his need for forgiveness and redemption from some poor choices in the past.

In fact, it was also clear that there were two different groups sitting on the dais—the group who suddenly found that “character” mattered and went after him for statements he made about women in the military, anonymous accusations about alcohol abuse, and sexual indiscretions.

That would be the Democrats, and Democrat women in particular. It sounded a lot like this (one of the funniest videos I’ve seen of the proceedings):

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that it was all grandstanding political theater with a goal to smear his name while taking out their anger on him because they know he has the necessary support to be confirmed. With only a couple of exceptions, including a Democrat who said Hegseth’s lack of experience in running a large organization disqualified him for the role, Dems basically dragged him through the mud.

Conversely, during his opening statement, Hegseth talked about how, if confirmed, he would focus on high standards, lethality, meritocracy, and readiness. Our military is clearly no longer the most lethal fighting force in the world, with China in particular being at or beyond parity.

Both Obama and Biden began degrading our military readiness by injecting DEI and other woke priorities (CRT) into the system. Hegseth vowed to pull it out “root and branch.”

I don’t know Pete Hegseth, so I’m not in any position to judge the man. He sounds like someone who would prefer not to have women in combat positions (I agree with that) but said that women would be welcome in all roles as long as they were held to gender neutral “high standards.” If the Pentagon under Hegseth raises or strengthens its standards, it’s likely that many (most?) women won’t qualify for combat roles.

Cue the tears.

Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media writes:

One of the saddest recurring cries for help on Tuesday was listening to some of the Dems complain about the fact that Hegseth declined to meet with them prior to the hearing. More precisely, Hegseth ignored them. The implication was that they may have thought more highly of him had he paid them a little attention. That’s patently absurd, of course, and Hegseth knows that. They’re dealing in bad faith and no Republican ever need indulge their foot-stomping attempts to make it all about them.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said that Hegseth has the votes to be confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense. The Dems’ desperation on Tuesday leads me to believe that’s true.

What I heard, I liked. Let’s hope all of Trump’s nominees are as successful as Hegseth seems to have been.

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The Broadside | Delusional Old Man Had Perfect Administration

Only 7 more days until Trump becomes your president.

Joe Biden is winding down his pathetic residency with spectacular delusions of grandeur (link warning: NYT).

“Right now, in my view, thanks to our administration, the United States is winning the worldwide competition,” Mr. Biden said. “Compared to four years ago, America is stronger, our alliances are stronger, our adversaries and competitors are weaker. And we have not gone to war to make these things happen.”

https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1878886631333400932

Biden has always fancied himself an expert on international strategery. But he’s been an abject failure during his whole grifting career, and particularly as Resident when it comes to the U.S. being a stabilizing force in the world.

From Bonchie over at RedState:

Since Biden took office, China has grown the size of its military and expanded its political influence across the globe, from the South China Sea to Africa and even South America. As to Russia, one could argue their military resources have been depleted fighting Ukraine, but they are still currently invading Europe with no peace deal in sight. The only major American adversary that is objectively weaker in 2025 is Iran, though one could argue they are still more powerful today than before Biden lifted the crushing Trump-era sanctions that had the Islamist nation nearing collapse.

Here’s the kicker, though. Nothing Biden did led to any present-day weakening of Iran. The destruction of Iran’s proxies in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza happened because Israel ignored every red line the Biden administration set in terms of military action.

Biden’s speech is a first in a parade of addresses that he’ll give this week on his way out the door. He—or more accurately, his speech writers—is trying to frame the narrative for how he’ll be remembered. And he’s doing it in true Democrat style: by lying about his record.

I’ll remember him as a destructive wannabe tyrant who posed as a badass while demonizing half the country.

As Bonchie concludes:

Biden has been arguably the most destructive president in modern history, with only President Jimmy Carter giving him any competition. He can try to give these triumphant speeches on his way out the door, but Americans know the truth. He is a petty, hopelessly stubborn failure of a leader, and he can’t leave the White House soon enough. 

Only a week to go.

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The Broadside | Trust is a Diminished Currency

I grew up trusting the authorities. I was taught to respect my elders. I was told that I could always confide in a policeman if I needed help. We took ABC, CBS and NBC news anchors at their word. I trusted that pastors and professors and business owners and scientists and our political leaders had our best interests in mind.

It took a third of my life to disabuse me of my naïveté and I still catch myself uncritically accepting what I’m told by “the authorities.”

I bring this up because I remember hearing about the “snail darter,” a small, endangered fish that shut down Tennessee’s Tellico Dam in the 1970s, when I was a kid.

In the annals of environmental law, no creature is more famous than the Snail Darter, the endangered species that shut down completion of the Tellico Dam in the 1970s. It required congressional legislation to allow the dam to be finished after years in the courts where judges maintained that the species had to be protected under the Endangered Species Act. According to the New York Times., the species may turn out to be as mythical as a unicorn.

The controversy began in 1967 when the Tennessee Valley Authority started constructing a dam on the Little Tennessee River, roughly 20 miles outside Knoxville. Environmentalists and locals opposed the project and, in 1973, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee named David Etnier went snorkeling with his students and found a possible solution. He spotted a small fish and called it a “snail darter” because of its movements and eating habits. He reportedly announced “Here’s a little fish that might save your farm.”

Dr. Zygmunt Plater, an environmental law professor at Boston College, represented the snail darter before the Supreme Court. He did an excellent job and, in 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that “the Endangered Species Act prohibits impoundment of the Little Tennessee River by the Tellico Dam” to protect the endangered snail darters.

That was then.

The Times now quotes Thomas Near, the curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum who leads a fish biology lab at the university, that “there is, technically, no snail darter.” Worse yet, it was actually just another member of the eastern population of Percina uranidea, or stargazing darters, which is not considered endangered.

Near and his colleagues have published the results in Current Biology.

In other words, years of litigation and millions of dollars were spent on what was a false claim, and the courts accepted the claims hook, line, and sinker.

Got that? Some eco-nuts found a fish and labeled it “endangered” for purely political purposes. In other words, they lied. All these years later, we find out that it was a faked crisis.

Sort of like the January 6 “insurrection” narrative.

Then there’s this:

A newly released systematic review and meta-analysis of past studies found a link between fluoride levels and IQ in children.

A comprehensive federal analysis of scores of previous studies, published this week in JAMA Pediatrics, has added to those concerns. It found a significant inverse relationship between exposure levels and cognitive function in children.

Higher fluoride exposures were linked to lower I.Q. scores, concluded researchers working for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

None of the studies included in the analysis were conducted in the United States, where recommended fluoridation levels in drinking water are very low. At those amounts, evidence was too limited to draw definitive conclusions.

Observational studies cannot prove a cause-and-effect relationship. Yet in countries with much higher levels of fluoridation, the analysis also found evidence of what scientists call a dose-response relationship, with I.Q. scores falling in lock step with increasing fluoride exposure…

For every one part per million increase in fluoride in urinary samples, which reflect total exposures from water and other sources, I.Q. points in children decreased by 1.63, the analysis found.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a vocal opponent of fluoride in our drinking water and is considered outside the mainstream on this (and many other) health-related issue. But who is “mainstream” and what makes them “mainstream”? Well, if you’re considered an authority, and you agree with the generally accepted consensus, you’re “mainstream.”

Fluoride is one of those things where I’ve trusted that experts have our best interests in mind and would never recommend something that would harm the people.

Would they?

Of course they would! Covid-19 vaccinations, anyone?

So, there are two examples of the government getting it wrong (for sure in the case of the “Snail Darter” and now, more credibly, perhaps in the case of fluoride).

But, then again, why should I trust the new “experts”?

Our expert class has lied to us so often about matters so important that they no longer have my trust. I don’t believe a word that Democrats say, as I explained here. I sure as heck don’t trust the mainstream media. I don’t trust my physician because I know he’s incentivized to get me on medications. I don’t trust my mechanic because he tries to upsell me on things I know nothing about (do I really need the air filter changed right now?). I don’t trust the public schools because they’ve become progressive indoctrination centers filled with grifters (apologies to those few good teachers who make it a labor of love).

It takes a lot of effort to remain skeptical, to always be on guard.

Micah 7:2-3 expresses my disappointment.

The faithful have been swept from the land;
    not one upright person remains.
Everyone lies in wait to shed blood;
    they hunt each other with nets.
Both hands are skilled in doing evil;
    the ruler demands gifts,
the judge accepts bribes,
    the powerful dictate what they desire—
    they all conspire together.

The only one you can trust is God.

Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments. Deuteronomy 7:9

Have a great weekend.