Posts Tagged → Washington
February 19th, 2025
All those people and jobs and families and dreams and homes being lost right now in the Washington DC area….
I write this as a former Washington, DC, Beltway person, a former US EPA employee, a former 1964 tract housing suburban homeowner in a sterile suburban neighborhood, and as a former refugee of that big mess.
So, as the new administration takes shape, embeds itself into the federal bureaucracy and into the DC area buildings, apartments, homes, and businesses, and as DOGE begins to really dig into the catastrophic amount of waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer money in almost every single federal agency, we also hear about the cost in people there. That is, the cost in DC Beltway people whose jobs are suddenly ended, whose sinecure isn’t, whose gold-plated taxpayer funded lifestyle and pensions are now over or up in the air.
And while I do feel badly for all these people, this developing bloodied crust of human detritus being tossed about on the waves of the Potomac River, I have to ask all of them, all of you: What about all of the Flyover Country victims of these now sad bureaucrats over the years?
Remember the rural landowners whose private properties – working farms and forests – suddenly lost about fifty percent of their value after the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule was issued? Remember how those rural properties, which are the rural person’s own 401(k) retirement fund and pension, were suddenly, dramatically, radically devalued overnight by some politically radical bureaucrats in DC? Because those properties had a mud puddle on them?
And do you remember how just a few years ago the federal bureaucrats dismissively, derisively, arrogantly told everyone newly, artificially, and unnecessarily out of a job in the coal and natural gas industries to “learn to code“?
Well, folks, as it is commonly said, karma is a real big bitch. Ain’t it.
All those untouchable federal bureaucrats at EPA, USDA, ATF, FBI, DOJ, etc who enjoyed beating up on poor white working people in flyover country, impoverishing them with outrageously destructive and useless regulations, talking down to them…now suddenly some of these same bureaucrats are being held accountable. And this is not even a taste of their own medicine. This DOGE stuff is really just fixing a few broken tractor parts in the barnyard. Chief Executive President Trump has not even figured out which rotting barn he is going to try to fix and which rotting barn he is going to demolish, push into a big pile, and set on fire.
So, yes, some of my old friends in the DC area are either hurting or scared right now, afraid that they are about to be hurting. And I feel badly for them, I do. I do not want to see anyone lose their job, or lose their home as a consequence of losing their job, or not be able to pay for their kids’ college indoctrination experience as a consequence of losing their job. It brings me no pleasure. None. I actually feel badly for all of these DC federal employee people and their ending jobs, their ending careers and ending life plans.
I just also wonder if any of them see or understand the symmetry in all of this. The relationship between messing with the bull out in its rural field, and then earning the bull’s horns up your ass. Somehow, I think of DC Beltway people as not very smart, or not too wise, actually quite tribal and primitive, and having now lived within their own cozy bubble for so long that they are now living so far out in outer space that they really don’t understand what or why this is happening to them.
I am not saying that the DC Beltway bureaucrat people should be treated like cattle and just herded on out of the venue and sent out to pasture. But I am also unconvinced that they will appreciate being treated any better than that, either. They still have a deeply inbred sense of selfish entitlement that only a couple generations of working class reality can erase. C’mon out and join us in the hinterlands, and develop a work ethic we can admire, OK?
So, yeah. About all the sad DC Beltway people right now….
February 17th, 2025
Today is Presidents’ Day, the day Americans remember the more notable and benevolent of the presidents who have administered our collectively owned executive branch. As we are seeing daily, the chief executive has tremendous power not only over our military forces and federal agencies, but over things we rarely see behind the scenes, like how our tax money is spent.
Daily reports of outrageous payments of your and my tax money by rogue federal agencies are riling up Washington, DC, and are vindicating President Trump. Recall that President Trump stated that the Biden Administration was lawless in more ways than just politicized law enforcement and open borders. Turns out that for the past four years, American taxpayers have been sending our hard-earned money to the farthest corners of the planet for the most ridiculous reasons – promoting transgenderism and gender coordinators among climate change cultists in Asia, is just one such boondoggle. Hundreds of billions of dollars spent on subjects of dubious value, at best, and of fraudulent purpose. There is undoubtedly corrupt self-serving going on with these grants, as well.
In directly challenging these modern illiberal, really pagan, values that very nearly overran America, Trump is channeling something older and more powerful than himself, or even than modern America: His inner warrior is coming out. We are now seeing the spirit-man himself, no longer speaking from a sterile podium, but rather riding out on his horse, war paint on his cheeks, his Plains Indian headdress flowing in the wind, his reddened war club in his right hand, going straight at the enemy of all things good and sacred.
Mount Rushmore has the faces of our most famous presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Room remains for one more face, and various suggestions have been made about whose face it should be. Because Mount Rushmore is in the Black Hills, a place long sacred and special to various Plains Indians, and which was supposed to be set aside solely for the Indians, many people have suggested that the last face be Indian. Specifically, the same face that adorned the Buffalo Nickel.
A composite face, not necessarily Sitting Bull or Geronimo, but one that represents as many of the native tribes as possible, and thereby capturing the spirit of the carving: Indomitable and fighting to the very last. Truly American. Truly Trump.
While America forcefully defeated the many native Indian tribes, we then immediately put their faces on our coins and public symbols, because of our admiration for them. We liked to think that the deeply faceted spirit of the American Indians was in all of us. The American Indian spirit is something we still universally recognize and value, respect, and admire. So, I will put in with those who say the Indian head from the Buffalo Nickel should be the last face to go up on Mount Rushmore. Maybe just brush a little Donald Trump in there with it.
The way I see it, we will get a two-for-one out of it. It will be symbolic of not just the Indian, whose presence made our frontier more formative of the Yankee spirit that Trump now represents, our European settlers tougher, and our Declaration of Independence from tyrannical government stronger, but also of the inner Donald Trump, who was last in his generation to fight to the last, with everything at risk, everything on the table, against invaders and impure people.
That is the message this Presidents’ Day. Put an Indian chief up on Mount Rushmore, because the spirit of a free America has been defended, and it remains powerful medicine. It will really be Trump up there.


The spirit of Trump is alive, and defending America


America’s guardian
January 23rd, 2025
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.


January 20th, 2025
Today, with the swearing-in of President Trump, the entire seven-year period that the political establishment in Washington, DC, especially including “professional” prosecutors at the US Dept. of Justice, persecuted President Trump and his staff and supporters, has officially ended.
Along with the hard termination of the Democrat Party’s lawfare comes the immediate release from prison all J6ers, almost all of whom have been pardoned. A handful of J6 convictions were commuted, and may end up as pardons. Among the freed are Jake Lang, who languished in prison, often in solitary confinement, for 1,464 days without a trial.
Despite the US Constitution’s guarantee that all defendants get a speedy trial, for obvious reasons (e.g. so your life is not turned inside out by a drawn out legal process, especially if you are found not guilty), Jake Lang was simply kept in a hole in the ground because the Biden Administration was a cruel and lawless despot. He was never given a chance to defend himself, because he was never officially charged. He was simply held by brute force.
Proud Boys founder Enrique Tario was likewise in prison until today. He was jailed on false charges related to January 6th, even though he was nowhere near Washington DC on January 6th. Like Jake Lang, Tario’s case exemplifies the very worst treatment possible by a lawless and evil government hell-bent to destroy its political adversaries.
Note to the democratically hard of understanding: Using official brute force against your political opponents is lawless and un-democratic.
So it is against this backdrop of immediately ending blatant injustice that we now find America awash in likely criminal defendants. You know, the very same people who lied to put Enrique Tario and Jake Lang in prison without due process. These people are walking targets for the criminal justice system.
And despite Biden’s last-second cavalcade of pardons – all of his family members, Anthony Fauci, murderer Lt. Michael Byrd, all of the corrupt congresspeople who sat on the original January 6th committee and who illegally destroyed the evidence they had amassed – we must remind ourselves that No One Is Above The Law.
Not even Democrats. Almost all of these prospective defendants who abused their official positions of trust in the Biden Administration are Democrats.
Interestingly, a 1915 US Supreme Court precedent requires people who are pardoned to formally accept the pardon, and thereby admit their guilt in having committed a crime.
So the many criminals who have just been named as recipients of Joe Biden’s cover-up pardons do not get off scot-free. They don’t get a Get Out of Jail Free card and just walk off into the sunset. No, every one of these people must now wear the dishonor that comes with having been a pardoned criminal. And being a criminal disqualifies people from holding all kinds of official offices, serving on boards, holding secret clearances, etc. Some might not be able to be seated in Congress.
For example, if Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) admits that he is a criminal who destroyed evidence in a criminal trial (Schiff sat on the January 6th House Committee), he can be disqualified from holding office, even now.
Schiff et al is definitely guilty of something criminal. Otherwise, what was the pardon for? Innocent people don’t need pardons. One thing for sure, Biden’s pre-crime pardons are a vindication of everything President Trump said about the corrupt Biden Crime Family.
On the other hand, one wonders that in the absence of having been convicted of a crime, the supposed recipients of Biden’s blanket pre-emptive pardons may actually not qualify for the pardon. They were never convicted of something, so what exactly is the pardon for? This would neuter Biden’s jailbreak effort, and leave his family, Fauci, and others vulnerable to official prosecution.
Either way, whether truly pardoned by Biden or only hoped to be pardoned by Biden, these bad people still have some distance to go before they get the benefit out of it. Either way, they come out losers, branded with a scarlet C for Criminal, or eventually prosecuted for their crimes and held acountable through the justice system.
We will not have the answer to this question about Biden’s purported pardons until it is presented to the US Supreme Court, probably in a prosecution of someone like Adam Schiff, who would then have to formally declare that he accepted his criminal pardon.
In the meantime, there are a host of known and not-pardoned corrupt officials that the present government can process through the justice system: James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, Peter Stzrok, Bill Barr, and many others. Thereby demonstrating that NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW, including Democrats.
January 18th, 2025
Despite being bombarded with tickets and neat opportunities to go to the inauguration of President Donald John Trump in Washington, DC, I was of no mind to go. Not because I am not hyped and excited about his presidency, which I am, because of the good he is already having on world peace and the American economy, even before he actually takes office.
Rather, I had no idea what to expect once I got down to DC. Was it going to be all rainbows and happy unicorns? Or was it going to be mass riots and violence against Trump supporters, with local police standing by and allowing it to happen? And what about my own home, possibly at risk in any mass hysteria…
I was thinking about the days before the 2020 election, when I received a phone call from an old family friend of my parents. Someone I had not seen in thirty years at least, nor spoken to. An old far-left Quaker, Sam was in his early seventies when he called me in late 2020, and he was happy to get me on the phone.
“If Trump wins, we are organzing a nationwide boycott, massive civil disobedience, shut down the streets, protest marches in every city. And we need good organizers, responsible adults to help us prepare. Can I count on you to come to an important meeting in Philly next week?”
To which I replied, “Sam, it is so nice to hear your voice. Been a real long time. I know you and Dad enjoyed your philanthropic bike ride together last year, which was cool to follow. But I have to tell you, I am not in college any longer. That was decades ago. I left the Quakers decades ago over their political ideology, and I left my policy job at the US EPA in DC over the ideology there, too. I left the Democrat Party in 1993, after Bill Clinton was elected and tried to take away everyone’s guns. And to your point, I have donated thousands of dollars to the Trump campaign because I am a huge Trump supporter. So I don’t think you want me coming, because I will definitely ruin your Black Panther party,” trying to borrow a phrase from the Forrest Gump movie that I thought humorous and appropriate at the moment.
But Sam didn’t have to pull his trigger. Right after my brief conversation with Sam, the 2020 election was blatantly stolen, and America endured an incredible amount of purposeful self-destructive abuse at the hands of the Biden Administration, enabled by the ever-corrupt and lazy Republican Party.
No, for me now, the logistics of being in or even getting to Washington, DC, and running a gantlet of violent leftists, just to reach the inauguration site, and then standing in the cold, and then doing it all in reverse, was just too daunting.
Fortunately for me, I no longer have to endure the torment of happy reports of smiling unicorns and rainbows from ecstatic revelers who did manage all of the significant logistics to participate in person. Now that the event has been moved indoors (supposedly for weather, but probably just as much for the safety of President Trump), I don’t imagine all that many people are going to go to DC.
Except for Sam’s rioters and street theater thugs. I am quite certain those people will show up to protest and hurt innocent Americans and break things, no matter what formalities are or are not held outside, or who else shows up to celebrate.
Considering it all, last week I was of no mind to go in person, and even more so now I would still rather be at home sitting by my cozy fireplace, watching the inauguration on TV. Or maybe I will go out hunting that very last day of flintlock season. We are supposed to get a wonderful dose of snow Sunday evening, perfect for deer tracking and hunting in on Monday…now THAT is a great way to celebrate America’s new birth of freedom!
January 5th, 2025
January 6th is traditionally the date upon which the previous national election is certified in the US Congress, in Washington, DC, barring any discrepancies or challenges.
Certification implies a process, and any process implies steps and checks and balances. An election cannot possibly be automatically certified. What the hell would that rubber stamp prove? Certification in its fullest meaning means that all of the questions have been answered, any outstanding challenges have been resolved, and everyone or most of everyone involved is on board.
Certifiying an election means that it is a kosher product, unadulterated and without question legitimate.
And so while tomorrow Congress is supposed to stick around DC to certify President Donald Trump’s electoral success last November, it appears an imminent snow storm has sent most congresscritters squawking for shelter. Which leaves us with the opportunity to reflect upon just what meaning January 6th has taken on since the January 6th of 2021.
I participated in a peaceful protest in Washington, DC, on January 6th 2021. Originally gathering at the Washington Monument, around 1:40PM we eventually started walking down Constitution Avenue to the US Capitol, where we were supposed to peacefully show our displeasure at the obvious rubber stamping of a blatantly stolen 2020 election.
At this point, my memory of exactly where we ended up standing out in front of the Capitol is lost to the haze of time and age. However, I recall standing on a large stone plaza with a lot of other American patriots, many of whom waved American flags and other types of flags (Gadsden, many Trump themes, gay, Vietnamese) while peacefully milling around. We were facing the Capitol and about forty feet away was a line of metal barricades.
Out of the blue an unexpected and unearned rain of flashbangs and other explosive munitions were launched into our midst, while I personally watched peaceful protestors standing in front of the barricades get shot directly in their faces with explosives by the police officers who we thought were there to protect us from Antifa thugs (I saw several protestors with destroyed faces stumbling away from the barricades). I also watch police officers lean across the barricades and spray chemical irritants into the faces of peaceful protestors, as well as smash people in the head with their batons. I myself was shot many times with rubber bullets by a single determined police officer, who seemed to be trying to hit my face, but who instead hit my chest and shoulders (a picture of some of them below that I brought back with me).
Like many other peaceful protestors gathered around me, I was also gassed several times by pepper and tear gas munitions fired by the police out over the barricades and into our peaceful gathering. Being gassed is an awful experience. Mind you, none of us were doing anything but singing the national anthem and other patriotc songs, as well as breaking out into spontaneous chants of USA! USA! USA! We were standing exactly where we were supposed to be standing. We did not deserve to be shot, gassed, bludgeoned, or blown up by the police who were sworn to protect us.
The fallout from January 6th 2021 has only begun.
January 6th was nothing like the fake presentations done by the corrupt US House January 6th Committee, which dubbed in riot sounds over the silent CCTV footage they carefully cobbled together. Nothing like the ridiculous narrative told by the mainstream media. The vast majority of protestors on January 6th were peaceful, if ultimately shocked by the illegal brutality rained down upon them by uniformed police officers.
We expect a great deal of investigation to be done this year, into the official lawlessness and criminal police brutality we protestors experienced. Only a small handful of people were in or near the Capitol or its doorways, and only a handful engaged in real violence against the police. The rest of us deserve justice, and especially those political prisoners who have been languishing away without receiving a speedy trial, often in solitary confinement, since their violent arrests in 2021.
If American citizens receive huge pay-outs for minor injuries incurred from violent police officers, then what are people like me entitled to? My right eye still has a purple clot in it that I got from the gas or pepper spray on January 6th. I still carry emotional trauma from that violent experience, not to mention the several subsequent visits I received from FBI agents, who told me up front that I had committed no crimes on January 6th, but that they “just wanted to talk with me.” Like mafia goons. Their lawlessness is breathtaking.
Other Americans were seriously injured and permanently disabled by the police on that terrible day. The January 6th political prisoners have undergone years of torture and beatings in prison. All of these people deserve just compensation, and I really hope we will get it.
If nothing else, January 6th 2021 was the modern day Kent State or even the new July 4th (recall that on January 6th four protestors were killed by police, and zero police – none, nada – were killed by the protestors). We, The People stood up to the lawless thieves and power-hungry tyrants of our time, challenged their phony election certification, declared our ownership of the government they hijacked and our independence from their tyranny.
With the 2024 election of freedom-fighter Donald John Trump, we have ultimately prevailed, despite the legacy media constantly lying about us and about what really happened on January 6th, 2021.

I stood in the vicinity of the red scratch mark on the plaza

Rubber bullets that hit Josh 1/6/21
November 21st, 2024
Earlier today, former congressman Matt Gaetz stepped down as nominee for US Attorney General. The ridiculous scandal created around him drove him out. Within about six hours, President Trump announced that former Florida AG Pam Bondi was the next up nominee. And I do not have a good feeling about this selection.
Here is why: If you are trying to re-enter enemy territory and bring law and order to the Biden DOJ chaos, you are best served by having someone who is aggrieved. Someone like Kash Patel, who served in the Pentagon and as Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief of staff and investigator into the DOJ’s fake Russia Hoax scandal aimed at Trump. You are best served by someone who knows where the skeletons are buried and where the bad guys are hiding, and who is personally invested in fixing it.
Pam Bondi could easily be another Amy Coney Barrett, a moderate sheep sold in conservative clothing, who promised to act like a sheriff, but who ended up being a spineless liberal do-nothing on the Supreme Court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh also turned out to be a cute soccer mom, more interested in DC elbow rubbing than in implementing constitutionally sound legal decisions. America cannot survive with more of this kind of weak personality in leadership positions. The rot is too deep and too broad, and only the very meanest, toughest crime fighters will succeed in righting the listing ship.
My fear is that Pam Bondi will not want to rock the boat by making aggressive moves on big name crime figures, like Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland. Rather, she is likely to go after the second tier personalities, and only a few at that. People like Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein, maybe Jim Comey or Chris Wray. My fear is that she she will have a few big dog and pony circus show cases, and puff out her chest and strut around like she has done something. Letting all the myriad bad guys off the hook.
What DC and America need is a Batman, a caped crusader, someone so personally angry and hurt by the last eight years of cruel, lawless injustice, that he will stop at nothing to bring everyone to justice. That means the Merrick Garlands and the junior DOJ prosecutors too, everyone who all engaged in criminal prosecutorial misconduct. And whomever is responsible for the professional murder of Jeffrey Epstein inside a jail cell. And whoever left the fake bombs outside the DNC and RNC on January 6th. And and and….
Doors have to be kicked in at 4AM, tons of bad guys have to be trotted out cuffed in their underwear, and as much prosecution as can be dreamt up must be dumped on every. single. one. of these bad people who have wrecked America over the past eight years.

Pam Bondi. Someone this pretty probably isn’t going to be as tough as America needs. Photo credit CNN
Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised, but I doubt it. If nothing else, one hopes that President Trump has explained to Pam Bondi what his exact expectations are, and what the short timeline looks like for her implementation. We cannot have another Jeff Sessions or Bill Barr situation, where people who are entrusted with everything do absolutely nothing. And we also cannot have another situation where the AG does something, but not everything that must be done.
Batman, where are you?

America needs a caped crusader US Attorney General to bring tough justice to Washington DC criminals. Credit DC Comics (ironically)
November 17th, 2024
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.
October 27th, 2024
When I was a very young person, I was exposed to a shocking bumper sticker in bright red letters on a white background, on the rear fender of a rusty rattletrap vehicle in front of us: “QUESTION AUTHORITY“.
How I hate to admit that much of my adult political philosophy was shaped by that one dumb, but true and fortuitously placed bumper sticker, at such a young age. Guessing around 1972-1973.
Well do I recall asking my dad (who was driving our car) what that bumper sticker statement up ahead meant, and how the young hippie gave me his explanation. Recall that this encounter and resulting discussion was during the very end of the Vietnam War. It was a time of great change in America, with young people like my hippie parents finding their own interests and cultural comfort zones, and questioning assumptions and everything they had grown up with.
To my dad, QUESTION AUTHORITY meant to question what the government was doing, as it was the ultimate authority, and could cause great damage if left to itself without citizen oversight. He also told me it meant to question what people with authority and power and self-interest anywhere are doing, including teachers and policemen, to ask what corporations are doing, what drug companies and pesticide companies are doing, and so on. To my dad, and then to me, the bumper sticker (which I can still see now in my mind’s eye as clear as the day I first saw it) was the original fact check, an encouragement to think for myself.
It was the original statement of resistance against “The Man.”
“The Man” being the euphemistic hierarchichal boss overseeing all aspects of American (or any other country) government, industry, and culture.
Well, well, well, how times have changed.
Now, those once-young hippies run the government, the teacher’s unions, the drug and pesticide companies. They are The Man, they are in control, they do not want to let go, and brother they tolerate zero questioning of their authority. Their political orthodoxy is absolute and stifling. They tolerate no dissent. It seems once they had achieved power and control over all of the institutions and levers of power and decisionmaking, the once-young hippies settled into cruelly enforcing their views. The same views that once encouraged people to question authority.
But don’t you dare question their authority!
Yes, this irony seems lost on the hippies, but what is most curious is how few young Americans today want to question authority, to think for themselves. Instead, I see a huge proportion of American young people as mass produced, cookie cutter stamped young authoritarians coming out of the very industrialized education system. They do not question authority, rather they aspire to be the authority, the unquestioned, the duly obeyed.
Against the enormous array of completely corrupted and highly organized power and authority – the media, academia, entertainment, government schools, corporate America, Silicon Valley, the United Nations, both political parties in Washington DC, etc. stands One Man, who is questioning authority.
Against this incredible array of raw power and exploitative money stands Donald Trump, Our Man, the very image of resistance against The Man, of the American citizen standing against corrupt power.
The fact that so many young Americans do not identify with the underdog resistance the way the hippies did in 1972, the way healthy young people normally do, but rather so many desire to bully the underdog, to crush the resistance, to blot it out, to sadistically damage, cancel, hurt and destroy the underdog resistance, so that their own authority shall not be questioned, is a very bad sign. These are sick children.
To all the un-sick young Americans out there: Donald Trump is the resistance. He is the symbol of The People’s rebellion against the evil empire in Washington, DC. He is the underdog representing all of the forgotten little people in America, the forgotten workers and forgotten taxpayers, questioning the authority of terrible people, and he is battling against terrible forces of great evil and destruction. He deserves your support.
If you want to fight against the evil empire, join forces with Donald Trump. He needs you. America needs you. We have just a week remaining to save the galaxy, your galaxy, your future.


August 20th, 2024
On January 6th, 2021, I stood near the Washington Monument and listened to President Donald J. Trump speak about election integrity. He was right on the facts and also a bit long winded, but who in his position wouldn’t be. America had just witnessed a stolen election, and a presidency illegally ripped from Trump’s hands by a band of lawless bureaucrats and anti-America activists.
To say that America was shocked at the blatant theft of the 2020 election was an understatement. Most people expected the US Supreme Court to step in and hear arguments about the overwhelming details of rampant election fraud across the country. But no help was coming from the spineless weasels on the Supreme Court. And with very few exceptions, no help was forthcoming from anyone in elected office, either, as state attorney generals sat on their hands and looked the other way, and state legislatures refused to take impeachment and removal actions against rogue bureaucrats and lawless state supreme courts that helped implement the Steal of 2020, the theft an entire nation.
I will never forget marching down Constitution Avenue in the early afternoon of January 6th, arm-in-arm with people who were strangers on the one hand, and yet recognizable to me on the other hand. On my left arm was a black guy, probably mid thirties, visibly upset and shouting about our rights being trampled. On my right arm was a Hispanic guy, who was animated but who also seemed especially positive. We were bound together as Brothers in America. Regardless of our different skin colors, we shared then and still share now a common interest in the rule of law and honest elections.
I think we all expected our participation that day in that 100% peaceful march for our most important civil right, the right to vote, to bear fruit. We justifiably expected the representatives of The People to suspend the artificially forced electoral vote counting, and that all the obviously fraudulent actions in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia, would get a public airing.
Alas, the lawlessly violent police response to our peaceful civil rights march in front of the US Capitol matched the lawless behavior of the elected official class: Both groups ignored We, The People, and both police and members of congress went on unimaginable rampages against us. The DOJ’s shameful hunt for political dissidents continues to this very day.
As I wrote here on the day after January 6th, I was illegally gassed three times and repeatedly shot with rubber bullets by a police officer who was keyed in on me, and yet my face, which he seemed so intent to hit with his many rubber bullets, was just a few feet out of range of his gun. His projectiles kept hitting my chest, my shoulders, but never my face. I don’t recall there being much room behind me to step back from the officer’s assault, and like others around me, I stood shocked by what I was witnessing and experiencing. The police were supposed to be our protectors, not assault troops acting as an arm of the lawless political class.
January 6th, 2021, was the civil rights march of our time, and I am proud that I was there as an active participant. Unlike the police there that day, I did not hurt anyone, I did not break anything, and I did not act lawlessly. My heart and my mind are clear. The police, however, must be investigated and legally held accountable for their civil rights violations against us peaceful protestors.
Nothing is more important than voting, having the right to vote, and have your vote be honestly counted and not be diluted by fake ballots and hacked voting machines that deliberately change votes in favor of the lawless political class. Without one person-one vote, there is no republic, there is no democracy, there is no representative government of, by and for The People, and no America.
In 1964, elected Republicans overcame Democrat Party opposition and got America to pass the Civil Rights Act aimed at letting Black Americans live free and equal lives with everyone else. A year later, in 1965, elected Republicans again overcame Democrat Party opposition and got the Voting Rights Act passed, which allowed Blacks to vote freely and not be subject to the myriad barriers the Democrat Party was placing in their way.
On Januray 6th, 2021, a new civil rights movement was begun, one for clean voting in America. For elections free of violence, free of interfering police, free of hacked voting machines, free of endless fake ballots, free of endless vote counting so that one political party eventually gets enough fake votes to declare a fake triumph, and free of papered-over windows of vote counting rooms where Republican watchers have been ejected, which happened in many venues, including here in Pennsylvania in 2020 and 2021.
In 2025, America needs a new Voting Rights Act, that protects all American citizens: a) One paper ballot per legal voter, b) personal official ID by all voters that matches their voting roll information, c) in-person voting for all but military personnel and those with extenuating circumstances, d) no voting machines, and e) just one Election Day, with all results counted and announced immediately after counting that evening.
America will not continue as a free nation without this one essential civil right being achieved.