Posts Tagged → federal
Maybe too much of a good thing?
President Trump and his lawfully appointed government assistants at DOGE have hit the ground running fast, and they have hit the bloated, rogue federal government hard, without question. While Trump may have had an axe to grind with the brazenly insubordinate federal workforce in his first administration, and with all of the brazenly lawless government bureaucrats at DOJ, FBI, DHS etc et al who targeted him with made up nonsense criminal charges and official lawfare for eight years, I still don’t know how many people expected his felt impact to be quite this stunning, this soon.
Trump has been a ton of bricks coming down hard, and to his supporters this is just the beginning of the justice we have wanted for years. Because Trump was not alone in feeling the tyrannical wrath of out of control government. Many of us, his supporters, suffered with him, to one degree or another. Many of us were also maliciously targeted by the Biden Administration for the simple “crime” of having different political views than Biden et al., and so we are all cheering on Trump’s massively overdue housecleaning of the rogue bureaucracy.
Our joy has only been rocketfueled by the daily red meat descriptions of incredible Obama- and Biden-era fraud, waste, and abuse of federal taxpayer funds being discovered by DOGE. And certainly, Trump’s patriotic instincts for justice and hard-about correcting course are only more sharply honed by these really phenomenally outrageous reports. Official corruption now visibly real, and also apparently even bigger and worse than one could imagine. That reasonable Americans will want swift and harsh justice imposed upon the criminals who enabled and engaged in these destructive, nay, treasonous acts is also normal and expected.
All this said, there is sometimes too much of a good thing.
Amidst the required bloodletting we should also want to avoid the appearance of bloodlust. This distinction does not require so much of a let-up in quantity, but rather a more targeted reposte with the rapier. Because in the slash-and-burn comes collateral damage too much for even our beloved Saint Trump to bear. Recall none other than the much and long beloved United States Patent and Trademark Office. Founded by Thomas Jefferson, it is of long and great distinction, for many great reasons. And the USPTO is also of great importance to American business, and it is thus housed in the US Dept. of Commerce.
The highly respected USPTO may have just been caught with a DEI cheat in the executive office, but the office body itself bears no such resemblance. In fact, this work-from-home workplace was among the very first such experiments, begun nearly thirty years ago, with all out-of-DC USPTO attorneys working from expensive, carefully built home offices designed for use only with Dept. of Commerce software. No double incomes here, these attorneys are on the clock day in and day out. Step out of line, fall behind in your caseload, and yes, you, a government attorney, will find yourself standing in the unemployment line, lickety split. The production standards for USPTO attorneys are very high, and they enjoy real hard-earned respect in their field.
The USPTO is one of the very few federal government offices where such potentially harsh discipline still exists, and it exists for good reason: The likely cost of a single USPTO attorney lazing about is very high, borne directly by the AMERICAN businesses who rely upon the USPTO to help them fend off all of the nonstop Chinese fakery and thievery of intellectural property in the active international marketplace. So it also stands to reason that the cost of haphazardly uprooting these finely tuned instruments of American business will be quite damaging to the very companies and business sectors we say we want to protect. Among the ransacking, there are objects of great value worth protecting. The USPTO is one.
Yes, overall, the federal work-from-home thing looks as bad as it probably smells down there in DC. Yes, there are likely countless examples of how work-from-home has been abused across the federal workforce, especially since it became standard in 2020. I know from first hand experience, as I was one of the few at US EPA HQ who got to experiment with it back in the mid 1990s, simply to allow a little bit more room on local roads for DC-bound commuters. What I saw back then with a number of colleagues was what we see in the headlines now: Lots of posh gardening, home-based second businesses, etc., everything but getting The People’s business done. Getting workers back into the work environment is generally a good thing, especially holding federal workers accountable, who exist solely to serve We, The People.
In the critically needed march to bring sanity to our overall disastrously run federal government, let us not also toss the baby out with the bathwater, nor kill the lone golden goose. Let’s not have too much of the medicine America needs.
Should individual federal agents be held accountable?
Should individual FBI/DOJ/ATF/DHS agents be held personally accountable for the federal government’s Gestapo war of terror inflicted on innocent Americans over the past four years?
This question has been on my mind daily, for the past four years, because I was a law-abiding J6 peaceful protestor who was nonetheless visited and then interviewed by FBI agents, with all that that portends. These FBI visits and interviews with people like me, who they said up front had done nothing criminal, had committed no crime, were done for the sole purpose of political intimidation, with the intimation that a violent early morning FBI SWAT raid through your front door could be the next outcome (as was done to hundreds of innocent Americans).
Now this question of individual federal agents has become a ripe policy subject, because on Friday the acting DOJ secretary demanded a list of all FBI agents and DOJ staff who “worked” on prosecuting January 6th victims.
Yes, I am using a lot of language here that is probably unfamiliar to a lot of Americans, including people who consider themselves politically involved or at least politically educated on both sides of the spectrum. So here are some important facts that will guide your understanding of where people who share my thinking are coming from:
- January 6th, 2021, was overwhelmingly a peaceful protest that I personally participated in, peacefully, non-violently, non-destructively.
- January 6th’s peaceful protest was eventually marred by some violence that was aggressively instigated by the police, Antifa, and a lot of now known federal agents who have been videotaped and identified.
- Using video footage solely from the West Plaza and a couple doorways, January 6th as a whole, as an entire day start to finish, has been purposefully mis-described by the Democrat Party-owned mainstream media, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, and other Leftist-aligned information outlets and social media companies. The purpose of their deliberate misinformation and censorship of rebuttals was to create a political narrative they could and did use against their political adversaries.
- This false narrative about J6 served as a sort of “Reichstag Fire” moment that the incoming Biden Administration siezed upon to justify its unconstitutional draconian assault on anyone and everyone who was remotely involved with protesting at J6. Including peaceful people like me, who simply happens to hold non-Leftist views about government, governance, etc.
- Much of the DOJ/FBI/DHS/ATF draconian abuse of their American political adversaries involved hyper-violent early morning no-knock raids on families in their homes. These outrageous raids have been widely reported in the non-legacy media, and almost completely censored in the establishment press.
- Over a thousand non-violent Americans were violently scooped up in these dragnets, where dozens of heavily armed federal agents from FBI, DHS, ATF and DOJ would conduct military-style home invasions backed by armored cars and helicopters. Small children, pregnant wives, the targeted husband, grandmas, grandpas, were all handcuffed, taken outside in freezing winter conditions in their pajamas, abused, homes destroyed in unnecessary searches, etc. Families and homes and businesses were turned inside out because some protestor maybe committed a trespass violation.
- The legal justification and basis for literally every one of these cases was one gigantic procedural violation and deprivation of constitutional due process after another after another. Illegal judge shopping, false affidavits, blank search warrants, false accusations, planted evidence, home security cameras turned off… if there was a potential violation of individual rights, the Biden DOJ/ FBI committed it almost as a signal of their lawless impunity and unaccountability.
- Hundreds of innocent J6 political prisoners have languished in prisons and solitary confinement as a result of this lawlessness, including the lawlessness of corrupt federal prosecutors conspiring with political activist judges to deprive these victims of their due process rights.
It is in this context that I ask the question if all of the federal agents who engaged in these violent home invasions should be personally held accountable. After all, they must have known that they were not searching for some drug dealer or violent criminal. And yet they inflicted unbelievable and wildly unconstitutional harm on innocent American citizens.
As we learned at the end of World War Two, the whiny excuse “I was just following orders” doesn’t cut it, doesn’t excuse uniformed police and soldiers from their personal responsibility when committing crimes against unarmed civilians. And I believe there should be no excuse for the many federal agents who carried out these patently illegal raids.
Yesterday I emailed the FBI agent who came to my house in 2022, asking him who at FBI or DOJ had directed him to target me (screen shot of our email chain and his picture at our front door are below). His name, as he represents it on his business card, is Patrick Armor. Patrick and another FBI agent subsequently interviewed me in an attorney’s office. Despite stating up front that they believed I had done nothing criminal on J6, they quickly went for the jugular, trying to get me to say anything or give them pictures or photos that would incriminate me.
It was clear they were trying to get me to say anything they could later purposefully misconstrue as “lying to a federal agent.” Even though I had nothing to lie about and therefore would not lie. It was simply a procedural ruse to catch an innocent person on a “process crime.”
All in support of the establishment’s false J6 political narrative, to help them implement a full takedown of America.
These FBI agents were willfully, knowingly, aggressively trying to entrap innocent Americans like myself, so they could deprive us of our liberty, and then take away much, much more from us. Over the past four years many other FBI agents around America raided bank deposit boxes and private precious metals caches, pocketed the valuables, and rode off into the sunset, with no accountability. These public employees have been the tip of the spear aimed at destroying America’s democratic institutions and norms, our rule of law.
For four years thousands of Americans like myself sat waiting for our front door to be blasted open in the middle of the night, our homes to be violently raided, over at most a trespassing charge.
This unchecked lawlessness is pure evil, and it must be held to account. The people who both enabled and implemented this evil must be held accountable. Every single federal agent who was involved in hunting down J6 protestors must be investigated, prosecuted, and held accountable through the criminal law process. Same for their bosses and the judges who signed off on dubious warrants.
America has just endured four years of a sort of Rwanda, albeit I grant you not yet involving the outright mass butchery and genocide that the full Rwanda experience involved. But America was being set up for that to happen next, because the political enemies of the Democrat Party – concerned parents of school children, conservative Latin Mass-only Catholics, critics of transgender ideology, conservative Christians, political conservatives and constitutionalists and patriots and US military veterans…were all deemed to be “deplorable” and demonized and targeted.
So that our eventual liquidation would be acceptable and normal to everyone else.
In August 2022 I wrote here that America was going to need a truth and reconciliation commission. Well, we are hopefully about to begin that process. Holding the lawless and violent individual federal agents fully accountable will be just the beginning.
And one final thought: Every American should reject the Gestapo fascism that was being inflicted upon at least half of the country these past four years. While America’s borders were being purposefully left wide open and an illegal invasion was under way. And billions of taxpayer dollars were granted to American organizations aggressively and treasonsously trying to destroy America from within. If you are not mad about this, then you either are not paying attention, or you are part of the problem.
Send in Delta Force to DC Govt offices?
President Trump was sworn in to office three days ago, on January 20th, and within 24 hours he had signed something like a hundred executive orders. Maybe more. I lost count. One Trump executive order covered 78 EOs signed by Joe Biden.
Two Trump policies in particular have garnered widespread discussion and deserve focus: The pardoning of roughly 1,500 January 6th political prisoners and hostages held by the Federal DC Swamp, and the immediate suspension of all DEI activities and staff in federal offices.
Every pardoned J6 hostage was required to be released from jail immediately, and every DEI staff person was required to leave office and stay out of federal offices. With all DEI activities ended, there was no reason for those staff to remain in office. The pardons are a legal directive, and when the rule of law prevails, the pardoned immediately walks out of jail to their relatives or friends.
In response to President Trump’s executive directives, open insubordination, really an open insurrection and mutiny against the government, by public taxpayer funded employees has unfolded. Many of the DEI staff were simply moved into new positions with new titles in their agencies, instead of going on administrative leave, as their boss directed them to do.
Many of the J6 political prisoners are still being held in jail, and some have been badly beaten by prison staff within just the last 24 hours. Other J6 hostages have been deliberately flown and released into remote places far away from their homes and families, with no money, hardly any clothes, some wearing only prison slippers in the dead of winter in cold parts of America.
We are witnessing a raw power contest between the entrenched and heretofore unaccountable federal bureaucrats (Deep State or Administrative State), and their chief executive, their boss, the president of the United States. The president has issued directives, and the bureaucrats are telling him “Go eff yourself, we are not going to listen to you.”
Emboldened by decades of weak executive leadership and zero accountability (I have my own crazy war stories I can tell from my years working for the Federal government in DC three decades ago) (for a federal worker to get fired, both Heaven and Hell must be moved simultaneously, which is impossible to happen), federal employees are thumbing their noses at the president. I don’t think they are consciously daring him to follow up on his authority. Rather, the bizarre and artificially insulated, cozy culture that surrounds most federal workers has shielded them from ever experiencing real accountability, and it seems they do not expect to experience it. They can’t even imagine it.
From where a lot of outsiders stand, it sure looks like a large portion of the federal workforce has declared its autonomy from the chief executive, and is in the beginning of a full out insurrection against the American people, the Constitution, the rule of law. Recall that the American people chose this chief executive, this chief commanding military officer, this president. So when federal bureaucrats and military officers tell this president to Eff Off, they are telling the American people, the democratic process, the Constitution, and the rule of law to eff off.
We have not even begun to see the full DOJ, FBI, CIA, or Pentagon insurrrection, or a real showdown between ICE and lawless jurisdictions aiding and abetting illegal invaders.
And so, one concludes that President Trump must do the updated version of what President Lincoln did under similar circumstances in 1861: Send in the troops and secure Washington, DC.
In 2025, however, the US military is not riven by North-South/ Pro-Slavery-Anti-Slavery divisions, as Lincoln faced, or like George Washington faced between Patriots and Loyalists in the Revolutionary War. Rather, President Trump now faces a federal bureaucracy and a great portion of the US military that sees itself as autonomous from and removed from the American people. So who can President Trump rely upon to enforce his lawful orders and directives?
Sad to say, there are only a few military units that have withstood the anti-America, anti-democracy DEI onslaught, and who remain purely loyal to the constitutional chain of command and to their oaths of office: The elite American warriors, including the Navy SEALs, the Green Berets, and Delta Force commandos. These are the people who President Trump can most reasonably rely upon to see that his orders are being fulfilled in a timely fashion.
These are the people who President Trump needs to send into the J6 prisons, the FBI headquarters, the CIA headquarters, the ATF headquarters, the Pentagon, with full arrest powers, to ensure that the constitutional chain of command is being honored. Or in the alternative, that the insurrectionists are arrested and processed through the proper courts.
And I would suggest that the proper courts to hold trials of the insurrectionists are all out in the hinterlands, like western Nebraska, northern Idaho, Wyoming, west Texas, where judges still know how to properly mete out justice.
Forgive Me for Asking, But I Must
Forgive me, it is not my intention to cast cold water on our collective rejoicing at having President Donald Trump re-elected, again, and thus at having dodged the Democrat Party’s communist anti-democracy bullet aimed at America’s heart. It is true that Trump’s election gives us hope that our constitutional republic is not over. However, I feel like I am watching a repeat of 2016-2017, where highly qualified conservatives and Republicans were mysteriously bypassed, overlooked, left untouched by the then-new Trump Administration.
Well do I recall someone of real stature writing publicly then (2017-2018) about how mystified he was that no one from Team Trump had contacted him about any of the unique policy strengths he had, and how the new Trump Administration seemed disinterested or lost on whatever that policy subject was. Well, here we go again, from where I sit.
Trump supporters have learned to forgive the 2016-2017 lapses, missteps, failures, and missed opportunities as due to Trump’s unfamiliarity with government, his natural reliance upon long established and unreliable DC Beltway insiders, his understandably misplaced trust in deep staters and other bad actors, his misplaced faith in the weight of federal employees’ oaths of office.
We watched as Trump’s first term slowly, painfully, peeled away the mask from the hostile administrative state, generously bankrolled by American taxpayers and yet also so openly at war with us. We grudgingly learned to accept the stolen 2020 election as the cost of doing business within the parameters set for us by the establishment media, the administrative state, and its constellation of hostile non-government organizations, who then worked furiously from outside to undermine the very rules they set.
And so we miraculously prevailed in 2024, and America as founded yet lives again. And now we have earned the right to say openly, can we please not make the same and very avoidable mistakes again, this time around?
While President Trump is indeed appointing strong leaders who are willing to assertively implement his bold vision for a better government that is closely attuned to America’s founding documents and principles, one question has not been addressed: Who exactly is going to carry out these deep reforms?
With few exceptions (the US Dept. of Commerce being one), nearly the entire federal workforce was already openly insubordinate to President Trump the last time around. And there is no reason to believe that these public employees are going to honor their oaths of office this time. And if Trump follows through on the DOGE promise to eliminate entire federal agencies, and greatly streamline those that remain, then which law-abiding civil servants will there be to carry forward in those same agencies the Trump Administration’s policies?
Put another way, if President Trump installs leaders who, for example, change the name of the radicalized US Environmental Protection Agency, then which of the old USEPA staff will there be to then follow through with the systemic change through every artery and vein inside the old institutional body? If the federal government is going to aggressively do compliance checks or reel back in billions of dollars in Biden grants to far-left NGOs, then who exactly is prepared to hit that ground running? The current federal workforce is almost entirely unreliable, and if left in place, each and every federal employee will become a road block of one. The DOGE people had better be collecting lots and lots of names of prospective civil servants who are prepared to take the place of existing staff, who should end up fired from federal service for any number of good reasons.
House cleaning is promised, but who then moves into the house to give it new life?
Ending where this essay began, it is my turn to publicly complain: No one from Team Trump contacted me, way back in 2016-2020, or now, about my unique area of expertise. I am one of a very small handful of truly conservative Republicans nationwide with extensive hands-on experience with public land issues and wildlife habitat/ land conservation policy. No Trump staffer has called to ask my experienced opinion on federal appraisal standards, especially related to eminent domain, or on rights-of-way issues surrounding federal properties. To my knowledge, none of my few colleagues have been contacted, either. I am not looking for a job. I already run a small business that I really enjoy. But I am willing to volunteer my precious time to help shape sound federal policy that is a significant deviation from the longstanding horrible status quo.
President Trump has the loyalty of so many talented and experienced conservatives, any and all of whom will jump at the opportunity to simply help this one man (and his administration) who can save America. This is the big chance to get America back on track.
So why then do I feel like America via President Trump is once again missing easy opportunities to make lasting, good policy? If the right people do not identify and help fix these longstanding horrible policies, the civil servants will keep them in place, and we will miss a once in a lifetime opportunity for good government.
The sneaky New Jersey drones
Drones are being reported all around New Jersey. Not the little plastic drones we can buy online, nor are they the expensive Mavic drones used by professional surveyors, real estate people, security personnel, etc. No, these things are reportedly six feet across, which is a small plane, by definition only of military origin and purpose.
These rogue drones are showing up everywhere in New Jersey there is important infrastructure, like power plants, dams, military installations, government buildings. During daylight. Whoever is operating them is not shy, nor are they trying to hide their information gathering operation. This is being done out in the open.
Lots of speculation about who owns these drones, and why are they operating them, and why are they operating them now. Federal and state government spokespeople in the past day have said that either they do not know what these drones are about, or that they are definitively not from some speculated Iranian “mother ship” supposedly far enough offshore to avoid detection but close enough to operate the aircraft.
None of these responses ring true, and they smell like the federal government knows exactly what the drones are, and they also do not want to tell us.
The American People are in a bad sitaution here. Because either our government doesn’t know what is going on with a blatant violation of our national security, or our government does know and does not want to tell us. Both situations are unacceptable, because both are dangerous. We civilians are supposed to own and run our governments, not the other way around. If someone hostile is flying drones around America, spying on us, then that is a declaration of war. It is very dangerous, especially if our government refuses to respond appropriately.
Here is what I think is the only real explanation for these rogue military drones: China is blatantly scooping up as much critical infrastructure information as they can get while their pet Joe Biden is still in office. Recall that Joe Bribem, who has accepted millions of dollars in Chinese bribes, allowed a Chinese spy balloon to glide unmolested over all of America two years ago, gathering intelligence on all kinds of sensitive nuclear missile sites and other military/national defense facilities.
Recall, Americans were slack-jawed incredulous while our federal government went about its daily business as if nothing was wrong while the blatant Chinese spy balloon slowly spied on America, from coast to coast. China would not stand for such an invasion of its sovereign soil or airspace for one second, and no self-respecting national government elsewhere on this planet would either.
But America does not have self-respecting or America-respecting leaders right now. Rather, our entire federal government is a swarm of traitors, all loyal to China. China has spent decades buying politicians, buying businesses, buying business leaders, buying philanthropic leaders, and buying real estate around sensitive American homeland installations. The wide-open American border is exploited most by China.
Those federal bureaucrats who were not purchased outright by China are already Marxists, committed to seeing the downfall of the American government, from inside their government offices. And it’s not just faceless bureaucrat people at the FAA who are our enemies, it is high ranking officers at the Pentagon. Lots of them.
Treason and traitors in official positions are everywhere right now, and these drones are a symbol of how badly our federal government has been gutted, captured, and at the very least turned into a torpid possum sleeping in the back of my woodshed in the middle of December (you could pick that thing up by its tail and swing it around your head, and it will remain fast asleep and non-threatening).
Such are most of the local, state, and federal bureaucrats in America. It is like the “go to sleeeeeep” line we used to say on midnight big game fishing boats anchored off the Atlantic coast, where big thrashing fish can do a lot of damage. Before boating them we would stick them in the head with a large knife or even a small harpoon, and whisper “Go to sleeeep” as their life force ebbed away and their danger to boat and crew drew down. Thus is America asleep while the Chinese are sucking away our life force, rendering us into harmless children.
The Chinese know full well that a government run by President Donald Trump will both shoot down these drones and also follow them back to where they are coming from, and then exact the full penalty for invading America. And so they are getting away with everything they can get away with while they can. New Jersey is a hub of electrical distribution for the whole east coast, and if something were to happen to a key power plant or distribution line…a lot of America would be sitting in the dark.
These invasive foreign drones looking for ways to attack America are the cost of having had our federal government bought and paid for like a sack of potatoes.
A Tale of Two Different Approaches to Life, Government
We are witnessing a growing storm right now. Of historic, unprecedented proportion. Something out of a fantastical Hollywood CGI movie is taking shape in front of our eyes. Except this is no fake fantasy, it is the harshest of realities about to descend on all of us. God willing, and for good reason.
What started out as small dark clouds in 2016 has morphed into an enormous, growing boiling cloud mass with lightning shooting out of it, ominous rumblings became peals of sharp thunder. Pick your Armageddon or end-of-the-world SciFi movie, America and the entire planet are entering a new state of being, and this huge ever-growing storm of apocalyptic size and appearance is coming with it.
A Biblical parallel would be the Exodus story, where God’s holy Angel of Death went house to house, inflicting destruction, except on those pure souls who were favored. Or, America is about to witness a Noah-like flood that is going to wipe away all of the sinful grotesquery and leave a cleansed albeit forlorn and changed landscape behind, where green things can grow again in a purified world.
We are seeing the difference between two different ways of looking at life and government play out. And this Biblical clash of good vs. evil is about to get ugly, and disruptive. And beautiful. Change is constant, necessary, painful, and beautiful.
On the one hand is the Uniparty-Media establishment complex, with its ever expanding bloated, unaccountable, lawless, change-resistant, all-powerful federal bureaucracies. This huge, unholy carnivorous plant has been watered with the hard-earned tax money of the American people (taken at gunpoint) for about a hundred years, ever since progressive (Communist) president Woodrow Wilson began inflicting his vision for Big Government and Little Citizen on America.
Relying on the once-inspiring frontier mentality that America was always going to grow, expand, reach ever greater heights of achievement, progressives (statist communists, now Democrats) and their Uniparty GOP allies siphoned off ever larger amounts of American private sector achievement to fund their socialist horror experiment. And with everything on the line, they illegally manipulated voting machines and voting laws and looked the other way to steal the 2020 election, so they could cement their Uniparty rule over all of us once and for all.
And so here we are, about a hundred years after this slow growing cancerous fungus first took hold, and the American people are beholding this evil thing that was just about to take over our lives, eat us all up, and continue growing. Americans were slated to become permanent slaves to the Uniparty bureaucracy and its unelected functionaries who have been holding ever increasing power over our individual fates. And the American people said NO.
In response to the evil Uniparty bureaucracy, the American people just re-re-elected someone who believes in and is willing to fight fight fight at any cost for the original founding vision of America: A place of freedom and limitless opportunity for all of its citizens.
A place where the government exists to serve the citizens, not the other way around.
The coming shock as these two worlds collide is going to be cataclysmic. Yes, proponents of freedom and liberty are going to get the great cleansing they are hoping for, that America desperately needs. But do not kid yourself that the resulting fallout is going to be beautiful, or easy. No, it will be shocking to America’s core. We need this, but it will not be easy.
As the three readers of this blog already know, your dutiful author here is devoted to freedom and liberty at all costs, inlcuding the freewill donation of his own blood and life, need be. Minuteman at the ready, absolutely. Freedom from tyranny may be achieved, but it always comes at a cost, a true and measurable cost. And we are about to witness it, as the evil towers of Mordor come crumbling to the ground in a great shock. Hopefully without bloodshed.
What comes afterwards will be a weird quiet. The sound of one hand clapping, maybe. A thin, still blast of the shofar, heard at Sinai when the Law was given.
For those who are confused by this essay, take note of just one of dozens of such current policy situations: outgoing dementia-ridden White House resident Joe Biden has just signed a new contract with about 42,000 unionized federal workers, obligating the federal government to granting certain lush work conditions with these employees. Done as a business-as-usual end-run around the incoming storm, it ignores the catastrophic blast about to hit Washington, DC.
To wit: Every federal worker serves at the choice of the Chief Executive, who is The President. So all of these 42,000 federal workers can be immediately furloughed, their new gravy train contract rendered moot, and the incoming storm’s ongoing clean sweep will continue unabated. End of business-as-usual.
One man’s wreckage is another man’s treasure, I suppose. I am looking forward to picking over the smoking battlefield when this is over. But I bet I will find some distant kinfolk lying there, too. Painful price to pay, but necessary.
DOGE
Tonight I was inspired to send a DM to the folks managing the DOGE page on X. Not necessarily because I have thought all the time about ways to make government efficient or better (though I have written essays about it at American Thinker), but because over the years and last few weeks I have tried to reach out to some of my former US EPA colleagues in DC.
And not one has responded.
These people were close friends when we were young. We worked together, we socialized together, we watched each other get raises and promotions, cheered each other getting married, then have kids, etc. And over the last 27 years since I left DC I would occasionally get an itch to talk with some of them, and I would email and call. Some of my old friends came and visited me, fished with me, hung out around the campfire. It was fantastic.
To say that most of my phone calls were returned would be untrue. That many of the conversations were odd or forced would not be an understatement. I think most of my former DC friends viewed me as a traitor, or worse, some kind of infidel or crazy man, for leaving federal service and Washington DC. Really. I mean this. That is how tightly the horse blinders are on the people living there; they really cannot relate to most of the Americans outside of the Beltway.
Lately I have been trying to reach my old friend Paul. Paul did well. Went from EPA to NIH. He too won’t respond in kind. Just silence. I guess being a GS 15 in DC means you are automatically at the top of the American hierarchy, and above people in Flyover Country, too important to stoop so low. Even to connect with former close friends who helped you with your career. No condescending to speak with us lowlives, us worker ants, us neandethals. And yes, these epithets are indeed how many, many DC Beltway government apparatchiks view Americans outside the Beltway. Those of us toiling away in the dirt, with dirt under our finger nails. Grubby.
And so while my heart hurts from being ignored by people I had felt great affection for, and who I naturally expected to receive it in turn from, the pain reminded me of why Trump was elected, and just how cancerous, arrogant, uncaring, and out of touch the federal government has become in all of its heavy handedness and overlording it on us little people. And how effing spoiled brat entitled and unaccountable so so many federal bureaucrats have become.
So, thanks guys, my dear old friends, for inspiring me to reach out to the Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They are taking volunteers to help take a meat cleaver to the bloated federal bureaucracy I fled from. If there is one thing I have gotten very good at, it is volunteering. God knows, someone has to help fix what so much bad government has screwed up, and like cleaning up old tires in a trout stream, you can’t fix what is broken without volunteers. People who wade into the muck and get covered in mud to make the trout stream clean and habitable once again.
So…Private First reporting for duty, Captains Ramaswamy and Musk. Chainsaw, bulldozer, dynamite, chisel, sledgehammer or screwdriver, whatever is needed to help dismantle the out of control DC bureacucracy, I can do it. I know it all too well.
UPDATE: Apparently the power of the word is still great, because my old friend Paul called me. And we had a lovely conversation. Yes, he voted for Kamala, and I voted for Trump, but still, we were able to talk about our kids, our careers, our patient wives. There is hope for America.
Hurricane Helene says No Such Thing as White Privilege
“White privilege” may be the most racist thing you will hear anyone say or allege in your lifetime, probably from the most racist people on Planet Earth, white liberal Democrats, but that has not stopped this fake social construction from being pronounced and bandied about like it is actually real.
Well, Mother Nature herself has recently descended from the heavens above to demonstrate that in reality and in the natural world too, there is no such thing as “White privilege.”
In the form of Hurricane Helene last week, Mother Nature inflicted huge devastation and destruction upon eastern Tennessee and northern North Carolina and the regional demographic there. It is a group of people I have had a lot of life experience with and who I maintain intense admiration for, white rural working people.
That there are a lot of white liberal Democrats in Asheville folded into the mix of Hurricane Helene victims does not mitigate or reduce my sympathy or hope for everyone’s full recovery there. Everyone is equal before the law, everyone is created in the image of God, and we are all Americans who should be caring for one another, regardless of our political opinions or religious views.
So Hurricane Helene destroyed billions of dollars in built infrastructure, including homes, towns, villages, farms, rural roads and interstates and bridges and schools and hospitals, stranding hundreds of thousands of largely white rural American citizens without power, water, or food.
And so just to demonstrate that white people can be victims and actually have no racial privilege whatsoever, the federal government response to Hurricane Helene has been… almost silent. Like cavalier and ignoring the huge mess of human misery. Like on purpose.
Recall that to our elites, Appalachian whites are the deplorable, disposable, ignored, maligned, forgotten Americans who nonetheless mine the coal that gives us most of our electricity, serve as the roughnecks on oil and gas drilling platforms that run our vehicles, fill up the special forces and combat infantry positions in our most highly motivated and patriotic high-risk fighting forces, who log the forests that provide us with high grade lumber for our fancy kitchens and furniture, who work for the railroads, and who drive trucks across the interstates that bring Amazon Prime to your home super pronto.
In every one of these professions, these (white, rural) people are taking big risks that almost always exceed their expected financial return. Why? Because they are proud to work hard, and they love America more than they love themselves. And they are devoted to America because there is no other nation anywhere that will give them the same freedom and opportunity.
White rural working people are the people who disproportionately make America work and run and give you, dear reader, the comfortable lifestyle to which you have become all too accustomed. And now that these people need a lot of help to get through this natural catastrophe, it sure appears that they are being abandoned by the same federal government that is simultaneously giving away unlimited taxpayer dollars right and left to border-jumping illegal migrants and to the porous demi-government in Ukraine.
I am hearing mostly consistent reports of aid efforts from acquaintences, friends, and family in Asheville and eastern Tennessee (some of their own photos are below; one of my family members from there is now in a hotel in South Carolina). Last week a friend of mine from Harrisburg loaded up his work van with bottled water and food and drove seven hours to the literal end of the paved road in eastern Tennessee, where he followed signs to a Baptist church. There in the church parking lot he was met with tears of fear and appreciation, and many needy hands as entire families sought shelter there with their sole remaining belongings: Their clothing on their bodies. (Some of his own photos of this are below).
Radio personality Glenn Beck reported his unbelievably negative experience with a sole FEMA crew instructive example of No White Privilege To Be Found Here.
Plenty of political fallout has resulted from apparent Biden-Harris government failure, or even willful blocking of aid efforts. While checking his email at a FEMA post, a partisan leftist Democrat in my family there said this is all politically generated misinformation, but I don’t know if I can accept that. The damning reports and real-time online videos are overwhelming and seem irrefutable, while politically partisan mainstream media outlets appear locked into a defend-Kamala Harris-at-all-costs posture, instead of having their crews on the ground recording what the citizens journalists are capturing.
Tons of on-the-ground reports are pouring out of the region, showing a complete lack of federal interest in helping, and a complicated mix of local territorialism, miscommunication, petty power flexing, and even theft of supplies. And even when the Biden-Harris Administration does speak publicly, they are actually saying sorry, we have no money for your disaster relief.
Because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ALREADY GAVE AWAY all the unsustainable taxpayer money to illegals and the endless war in Ukraine.
Folks, not only was there never any such thing as White privilege, but when there was an opportunity to demonstrate that American Whites get treated at least equally with everyone else, both American citizen of color and illegal border jumper alike, the point is made by our current federal government that American White people come last, if they get any help at all.