The purity spiral on the left continues. Bernie Sanders was asked what he thinks Trump has done right. Here was his reply.
I think cracking down on fentanyl, making sure our borders are stronger. Look, nobody thinks illegal immigration is appropriate, and I happen to think we need comprehensive immigration reform, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for people to be coming across the border illegally.
(Set aside, for the moment, the question of why Sanders never bothered to speak up against the Biden Administration’s open borders agenda while it happening, because we all know the answer to that one.)
Seeing far-left icon Sanders call open borders a bridge too far led online commenters to wonder if the Democratic Party had indeed drifted too far left, and called for reappraisal of Biden’s open borders policies.
Ha! Just kidding! They called for Sanders’ death.
Asmongold offered up a Whitman’s Sampler of deranged online comments on Sanders daring to deviate from the Party line:
“I think illegal immigration is appropriate…and actually doesn’t exist b/c people aren’t illegal and borders aren’t real.” Proving yet again that no leftwing talking points lifted off a plastic yard sign are too banal or naive to be defended as Holy Writ by the terminally online.
“Nazi.”
“imagine selling out your entire base just to cosign Trump’s racist policy. bernie you bald spineless fraud shut the fuck up” The online left continues to display the fine capitalization, punctuation and grammar we’ve come to expect from them.
“Kill All Bernies.”
“The ‘moderate’ wing of fascism”
“Bernie Sanders is the racist freak and i wish he died”
As the Democratic Party becomes more radical and shrill, it shrinks, and as it shrinks, it becomes more radical and shrill. As those with any free-thinking or moderate tendencies flee the party, those remaining double-down on making even the most unpopular far-left talking points sacred catechisms that cannot be deviated from. That Bernie Sanders, a figure who was considered so far left that the DNC rigged two successive presidential primaries to deny him the nomination, can now be branded a heretic for opposing open borders indicates just how smothering the woke mind virus orthodoxy of the left has become.
It’s hard to keep up with all the waste and fraud allegations coming out of the DOGE deep-dives into the labyrinth depths of federal funding swamps. Musk just went on Ted Cruz’s Verdict podcast and revealed some new twists.
Musk estimates that there is an 80/20 ratio of waste to fraud in the federal budget and says $1 trillion in annual savings is not outside the realm of possibility.
“You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes, okay? It’s very obvious, basic stuff. In every government department, and I say ‘every’ because we’ve not yet found a single exception, there are far too many software licenses and media subscriptions, meaning many more software licenses and media subscriptions than there are humans in the department. Like, an agency with 15,000 people might have 30,000 licenses,” Musk said. “We found entire situations of software licenses or media subscriptions where there were zero logins. And yet we were paying for it. Yes, the government was paying for thousands of licenses of software or media subscriptions, and no one had ever logged in even once. Or, like credit cards—you found the same thing with government credit cards. We found that there are twice as many credit cards as there are humans.”
“I still don’t have a good explanation for why this is the case. And these are $10,000-limit cards, so it’s a lot of money.”
“It’s like 80% waste, 20% fraud but you do have sort of gray areas. We saw a lot of payments going out of treasury that had no payment code, no explanation to the payment,” Musk said. “Like a contract was supposed to be shut off, but someone forgot to shut it off, so the company kept getting money. is that waste or fraud? Both.”
“One of the biggest scam/fraud hauls we’ve uncovered -which is crazy- is that the government can give money to a so-called ‘non-profit’ with very few controls and there’s no auditing subsequently of that non-profit,” Musk said. “They then give themselves lavish insane salaries, expense everything to the non-profit, buying jets and homes and all sorts of things.”
“This is happening at scale,” Musk said. “This is not just one or two, we’re seeing this everywhere. It’s insane.”
“You may think that these government computers all talk to each other—they synchronize, they add up what funds are going somewhere, and it’s coherent, that the numbers you’re presented as a senator are actually the real numbers,” Musk offered. “They’re not.”
“I mean, they’re not totally wrong, but they’re probably off by 5% or 10% in some cases.”
“So, I call it a ‘magic money computer,’ any computer which can just make money out of thin air,” he said. “It just issues payments. And you said there’s something like 11 of these computers at the Treasury that are sending out trillions in payments? They’re mostly at the Treasury. Some are at HHS, some—there’s one or two at State. There’s some at DOD. I think we’ve found now 14 magic money computers. They just send money out of nothing.”
“The government is run by computers. So, you’ve got essentially several hundred computers that effectively run the government,” Musk said. “So, when somebody, even when the President, issues an executive order, that’s going to go through a whole bunch of people until, ultimately, it is implemented at a computer somewhere. If you want to know what the situation is with accounting, and you’re trying to reconcile accounting and get rid of waste and fraud, you must be able to analyze the computer databases. Otherwise, you can’t figure it out—because what you’re doing is asking a human, who will then ask another human, ask another human, and finally usually ask some contractor, who will ask another contractor to do a query on the computer.”
How many of those “magic money computers” were directly transferring money to Democratic pockets?
It seems like it’s graft, fraud and corruption all the way down.
80 inmates per each cell, no mattresses, no sheets, a communal toilet, and a communal bathing basin.
A remote mountain location with multiple checkpoints before you even get to the prison itself.
Nine meters of concrete walls topped with electrified fence.
“The director tells me the inmates, once they’re inside one of the sectors, they never leave.”
23.5 hours a day, they stay in the cell.
Inmates who get violent get put in solitary, with one tiny light hole in the ceiling.
As I noted in the LinkSwarm, these very effective control measures would, quite correctly, be considered cruel and unusual punishment if applied to American citizens.
The second topic is the violent Tren de Aragua gang, which we’ve covered here, here, here, here, and here, among other places.
So what’s combining these two stories? Trump’s crackdown on and deportation of criminal illegal aliens. Well, guess what prison Trump is deporting Tren de Aragua scumbags to?
The Trump administration ignored a temporary court order to halt deportation flights of accused Venezuelan gang members — and is vowing to take it up with the highest court in the land.
“This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we’re going to win,” a senior White House official told Axios.
During an emergency hearing on Saturday, US District Judge James Boasberg issued a 14-day restraining order to prevent the administration from evoking the 1789 Alien Enemies Act as justification for deporting illegal immigrants convicted of crimes without hearings.
I know you’ll be shocked to learn that Boasberg was nominated to his current district court seat by Obama.
“Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States however that is accomplished,” Boasberg wrote, according to the Washington Post.
However, a day later, the first flight carrying more than 250 Venezuelan gang members left the US bound for El Salvador, where they were escorted off the plane by heavily armed commandos and brought to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
The flights included 238 members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, as well as 23 members of MS-13, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, revealed Sunday morning.
A second official told the outlet that the administration’s justification for ignoring Boasberg’s order was that the ruling didn’t apply because the flights were being flown over international waters, and that his edict came too late to turn the planes around.
Snip.
President Trump shared a dramatic video of the prisoner transport on Truth Social Sunday evening, showing shackled men being roughly led from the planes onto armored troop transport vehicles.
“These are the monsters sent into our Country by Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats. How dare they! Thank you to El Salvador and, in particular, President Bukele, for your understanding of this horrible situation, which was allowed to happen to the United States because of incompetent Democrat leadership. We will not forget!”
Naturally, Democrats are appalled that Trump is deporting their precious illegal alien criminals.
Four Democratic senators on Monday called Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act for immigration enforcement an “unlawful and brazen power grab.”
“All of us, including the courts, must continue to hold this administration accountable, and prevent the Trump administration from taking us down a dark and dangerous road,” Senators Dick Durbin, Alex Padilla, Cory Booker, and Peter Welch said in a statement.
That’s some clever, out-of-the-box thinking by President Trump, getting gangbanging scumbags deported, deterring other criminals by making clear they’ll end up in much worse prisons than those in America, and getting Democrats to, yet again, jump on the wrong side of an 80-20% issue.
Good job, Mr. President!
* I don’t know if this is actually the world’s worst prison, but it’s the worst one I know about. There are probably prisons in China or Afghanistan that are worse…
Up in the 51st state leftwing Canukistan, Justin Trudeau is stepping down after nine long years in power in favor of banker Mark Carney.
Former central banker Mark Carney won the race to become leader of Canada’s ruling Liberal Party and will succeed Justin Trudeau as prime minister, official results showed on Sunday.
Carney will take over at a tumultuous time in Canada, which is in the midst of a trade war with longtime ally the United States under President Donald Trump and must hold a general election soon.
Carney, 59, took 86% of votes cast to beat former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in a contest in which just under 152,000 party members voted.
“There’s someone who’s trying to weaken our economy,” Carney said of Trump, spurring loud boos at the party gathering. “He’s attacking Canadian workers, families, and businesses. We can’t let him succeed.”
“This won’t be business as usual,” Carney said. “We will have to do things that we haven’t imagined before, at speeds we didn’t think possible.”
Trudeau announced in January that he would step down after more than nine years in power as his approval rating plummeted, forcing the ruling Liberal Party to run a quick contest to replace him.
“Make no mistake, this is a nation-defining moment. Democracy is not a given. Freedom is not a given. Even Canada is not a given,” Trudeau said.
Carney, a political novice, argued that he was best placed to revive the party and to oversee trade negotiations with Trump, who is threatening additional tariffs that could cripple Canada’s export-dependent economy.
Trudeau has imposed C$30 billion of retaliatory tariffs on the United States in response to tariffs Trump levied on Canada.
“My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect,” Carney said.
Yeah, Trump is not exactly known for giving in to demands for “respect.” And given that the United States makes up some 77% of Canada’s world trade, while the Canada only makes up some 13% of America’s $9 trillion in global trade, the power dynamic between the two countries is hardly equal. Canada is much, much more exposed to economic hardship in a trade war than the United States is. I expect Carney’s and Canada’s resolve to work about as long and well as it did in the South Park “Canada on Strike” episode.
Can we expect Carney to undo some of Trudeau’s most heinous policies?
Don’t get your hopes up.
Mark Carney: “While America engages in the war on woke, Canadians value inclusiveness.” So Canada’s government will continue the same woke policies that helped drive Trudeau (and Canada) down.
Jordan Peterson: “The inevitable Grand Pooba of the currently wretched, but still dangerously powerful, Liberals, one Mark Carney, is one of the world’s prime advocates of the insane inanities of Net Zero.”
JP: “He is a man who has planned, in writing, not least in his bestselling book Values, the complete destruction of the fossil fuel industry. Bye-bye Alberta.”
JP: “If that’s not bad enough, and it is, he’s also simultaneously an advocate of the same postnational view of Canada defined by Trudeau Jr and his moralistic minions.”
JP: “What are we, according to such good thinkers? Nothing. Nothing, but if anything, the oppressive, patriarchal, white-supremacist, identityless, colonial settler state defined by the progressive ideologues in the think tanks and elite dining rooms in eastern Canada.”
Dave Rubin: “If you live in western Canada, particularly where oil and natural resources are important, this man is basically trying to destroy your livelihood.”
Don’t expect anything to change until Canadian federal elections later this year.
Very little of this will be new to long-time readers, but Paul Kengor at Prager U narrates this video to remind us, yet again, that Mao Zedong was a complete and utter bastard.
“Mao became a Marxist not out of idealism; his only ideal was Mao. The plight of the Chinese people meant nothing to him, not as a young man and not as a dictator. For Mao, other people existed to be used. Their lives didn’t matter at all.”
I’ll skip over the history of his rise to power and skip right to where the atrocities start.
“Half a billion people, a fifth of the world’s population, were thrust into one vast ideological laboratory in rural areas. Families were herded into collective farms. They no longer would work for themselves, they would work for the government.”
“This was as true for women as it was for men. In a perverse way, Mao believed in the equality of the sexes. If men could do backbreaking labor in the fields and factories, why couldn’t women?”
“There was no real equality in China for anyone, male or female, and no chance of improving one’s condition.”
“If you were assigned to a village, you had to stay in that village. If you were assigned to a city, you had to stay in that city. Whatever job the party gave you, that was your job. You couldn’t say ‘I would rather be a teacher than a farmer.’ Well, you could say it, but if you did you’d be shot.”
“There was also no equality between the proletariat and the elite. Mao lived in total luxury and hedonism. He had a dozen custom-built homes scattered throughout the country. Peasant girls were brought to him for his sexual satisfaction. Mao refused to bathe or brush his teeth and had chronic venial disease.”
“He ate whatever his heart desired, meat, vegetables and pastries, Meanwhile, peasants starved in mud huts.”
“Why couldn’t the peasants feed themselves like they had for centuries? [Mao] was exporting food all through this period. He believed China had to be a great military power, so he traded food for industrial hardware and armaments. The Soviets in Eastern Europe got the grain, Mao got the guns.”
“The peasants got nothing, and then they got less from 1958 to 1962. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao pushed the peasants even harder. Their suffering is impossible to describe. First they ate the dogs, then the rats, then the bark from the trees, then in some cases human flesh. According to a contemporary account, ‘the life we had to endure in those days was worse than the life of primitive societies. We lived like animals.'”
“Tens of millions died before Mao finally backed off.”
“In the mid 1960s, he instigated the so-called Cultural Revolution encouraging Chinese college students to denounce anyone not sufficiently revolutionary. This included their own parents and grandparents. And then, when he felt the college students had gone far enough, he turned on them. Thousands were sent to labor camps, and of course many were tortured and executed. It wasn’t a Mao Purge if that didn’t happen.”
“After being directly responsible for the murder of between 50 and 70 million of his own people after impoverishing the most populous country in the world, after killing anyone who opposed him, Mao died in his bed in September 1976.”
Indeed, Mao killed more people than any other leader in history, Hitler and Stalin included. And Kengor didn’t even touch on Mao’s bloody subjugation of Tibet, or his insane attempt to exterminate sparrows.
A bit more on Mao’s genocide, along with that of other communist nations, plus a bit of bibliography on the subject, can be found here.
I’m a conservative who supports Donald Trump’s agenda, and also someone who opposes Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine and wants to see Ukraine win. But I’m not freaking out over Volodymyr Zelensky’s disasterous Oval Office meeting with Trump.
It’s like media and political observers who have been watching Trump for close decade are still flabbergasted when Trump does Trump things in a Trump way. Trump works on persuasion and negotiation framing and pursues a tit-for-tat game theory strategy: Cooperate with him and he’ll cooperate with you, attack him and he’ll attack you. Given those parameters, Zelensky played things exactly wrong.
The meeting between President Donald Trump, VP J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was nothing short of explosive, fantastic, and satisfying. So much so that America collectively need a smoke afterward.
The Democrats, however, seem to think Trump just beheaded a statue of Apollo and now the gods will be wrathful.
But besides watching an entitled brat of a world leader get raked over the coals by the guy from The Apprentice and a hillbilly millennial, Zelensky’s strategy was a head scratcher. Perhaps he was so used to American politicians who were willing to lay themselves down into puddles, so Zelensky wasn’t ready to talk to two dudes who don’t feel the need to perform for the media, which Vance seemed hyper-aware of, and pointed that out to Zelensky.
Perhaps he thought America owed him one, and thus his smug attitude, but as Bonchie noted in his article, this wasn’t wise:
Trump has never accepted the idea that Ukraine is doing the United States a favor by fighting Russia as a way of justifying unlimited aid. Perhaps Joe Biden found that argument persuasive, but Joe Biden is not in office anymore. Russia is not going to invade the United States or any NATO country (if for no other reason than a lack of capability), and using that as a type of blackmail for support was never going to play.
Actually, if Putin had succeeded in gobbling up Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (NATO countries all) would have become targets. The mauling Russia has received in Ukriane put that off the table, especially with Finland and Sweden now in NATO.
And herein we find the trump card that Trump had on Zelensky… you know, besides the money the world’s most successful beggar came to get.
Trump’s negotiation strategy vastly differs from many other American leaders, especially those on the Democrat side of the aisle. Despite Trump’s reputation as a rough-around-the-edges man whose political charm is far divorced from what people expect after watching The West Wing too much, he is a master negotiator.
Even when it comes to our enemies, Trump is not going to negotiate from a position of bad faith. He sees everything as a businessman would. There are no friends or foes while at the table, just good deals and bad deals.
I thought The Federalist CEO Sean Davis put this very well in a post he made on X:
Trump doesn’t bad mouth anyone who comes to the negotiating table in good faith. Ever. It’s a near-cardinal rule of negotiations for him, and a major reason he’s been such a successful dealmaker.
If you refuse to negotiate, he will trash you. If you lie or negotiate in bad faith, he will trash you. He has zero interest in allowing empty moralizing to get in the way of a deal that he wants.
He has done this his entire career, in business and in politics, and it’s fascinating to me how many people who think of themselves as smart and savvy are incapable of seeing or understanding this dynamic.
The key here isn’t just that Trump is holding the cards and that Zelensky needs him — not the other way around — it’s that Trump is negotiating from a fortified position of “America first.” Everything at the table is subject to that one point, and if anything drifts away from that, then Trump pushes back and pushes back until he’s all the way gone from the table.
Zelensky acted like a petulant child who showed no respect to the country that had given him the money for his war while trying to secure more, and Trump saw no value, not in the war, and not in Zelensky’s disrespect. As such, there was no deal. Moreover, Zelensky attempted to pressure Trump into capitulation through our own media, which was a costly mistake. Trump is not beholden to the American media as other leaders are.
Here’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio explaining how Zelensky screwed up in even blunter terms:
Clearly Zelensky screwed up. Ukraine needs America a whole lot more than America needs Ukraine. Europe’s help has been valuable, but they can’t supply Ukraine with Patriot missiles, HIMARS, and a dozen other high tech items from America’s vast arsenal that have been absolutely essential for fighting Russia to a standstill.
As incompetently as Russia has run this war, Ukraine has not made notable gains in taking back its occupied land since the Kharkiv Counteroffensive in 2022. Though Ukraine has considerably degraded Russia’s logistics, energy and industrial infrastructure, and the Kursk offensive has captured Russian land and tied up forces that can’t be used elsewhere, it hasn’t launched a real counterattack to recapture Ukrainian land since 2023. A stalemate that continues to destroy what’s left of Russia’s Soviet stockpiles is still helping NATO, but doesn’t do anything to advance Trump’s other foreign policy goals for America.
Clearly the Trump Administration is unhappy with the stalemate of the war, and it is naive to think that the United States would be willing to underwrite the continuance of the war for tens of billions of dollars indefinitely. Just as clearly, Zelensky took the wrong approach and made several blunders dealing with Trump.
I am optimistic that Zelensky and Ukraine can change their approach and come to an agreement with the Trump Administration. But that agreement will have to be on Trump’s terms, not Zelensky’s.
Joe Rogan interviewed Elon Musk again, talking a lot about AI and his DOGE work. I haven’t remoptely seen all of it yet, but a lot of the DOGE stuff is interesting.
Joe Rogan: “Everybody should be celebrating that we’ve found a way to cut out fraud and waste. If you pay taxes, and you don’t like that you have to pay so much in taxes, and then you find out that there’s significant fraud, and waste that’s been exposed you should be celebrating. It shouldn’t be ‘oh no, the wrong people found this fact and now it’s a bad thing.'”
Elon Musk: “Mutilating animals in demented studies, that are like the worst thing you could possibly imagine from a horror show.”
JR: “The beagle puppy one, where they they covered their head in a basket and put fleas on their head so they eat them alive.” Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.
EM: “The real threat here is to the bureaucracy…[they say] ‘Trump as a threat to our democracy’…but if you if you just replace ‘threat to democracy’ with ‘threat to bureaucracy,’ it makes total sense.”
EM: “DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy.”
EM: “Normally the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time that they’re not, that the revolution might actually succeed, that we could restore power to the people instead of power to the bureaucracy.”
EM: “We saw one person was getting $1.9 billion sent to their NGO which basically got formed about a year ago.”
EM: “The whole NGO thing is a nightmare, and it’s a misnomer. Because if you have a government-funded non-governmental organization, you’re simply a government-funded organization. It’s an oxymoron.”
EM: “Government-funded NGOs are a way to do things that would be illegal if they were the government, but are somehow made legal if it’s sent to a so-called nonprofit.”
EM: “People cash out these nonprofits. They become very wealthy through nonprofits. They pay themselves enormous sums through these nonprofits.”
EM: “It’s a gigantic scam. Like, one of the biggest, maybe the biggest, scam ever.”
EM: “I think there a total number of NGOs, probably millions. But in terms of large NGOs, tens of thousands. It’s actually kind of a hack to the system, where you know someone can get an NGO stood up for for a fairly small amount of money, like George Soros.”
EM: “[Soros] is really good at this. George is like a system hacker. Like he figured out how to hack the system. He’s a genius at arbitrage…he figured out that you could leverage a small amount of money to create a nonprofit, then lobby the politicians to send a ton of money to that nonprofit. So you can take what might be a $10 million donation to a nonprofit and leverage that into a billion dollar non-NGO.” So Soros isn’t destroying America with his money, he’s destroying America with our money.
EM: “And then [the] government continues to fund that every year, and it’ll have a nice sounding name like The Institute For Peace, or something like that.”
EM: “It’s a giant graft machine.”
JR: “It’s a giant propaganda machine, a giant regime change machine.”
EM: “Yes.”
EM: “We have continued fund things that appear to be legitimate.” And here’s where I part ways with Elon. “Doing good works in foreign countries” is not a constitutionally enumerated power or responsibility of the federal government, and thus should not be undertaken by the federal government.
Musk notes that we don’t want to donate to a lab that says they’re fighting Ebola only to find out they’re creating mutant strains of Ebola.
EM: “Interest payments on the national debt exceeds the defense department budget, which is truly astounding, which means so we’re paying over a trillion dollars of interest on the national debt.”
EM: “As bad as Twitter was, the federal government is much worse.”
EM: “The federal government is not break. It’s literally losing $2 trillion a year and it fails its own audits.”
Of all the transitions to majority rule in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa’s was probably the most successful, with the Apartheid regime coming to a negotiated end rather than a violent bloodbath.
But thirty years of African National Congress rule, either solo or in coalition, find South Africa undergoing a gradual collapse toward Sub-Saharan standards, as seen in this France 24 video on the decline of Johannesburg.
“Johannesburg, once the economic powerhouse of all of Africa. But over the last 20 years the city, has fallen into decay, the inner city streets are lined with trash, potholes, and degraded footpaths. And broken infrastructure has led to contaminated rivers and wasted drinking water.”
“Adele is part of a resident crisis committee. She says her complaints to the council about broken pipes often go unheard.” “Now we just have rivers of excrement and trash.”
These an upstream river trash catch facility that’s been broken for two years.
“Johannesburg restricted access to tap water for residents in November, but more than a third of available drinking water is wasted from broken infrastructure.”
“The African National Congress has been bleeding support in Johannesburg since 2016, leading to chaotic coalitions. Infighting and opportunism which has seen the city ruled by ten different mayors over the last five years. With each change of mayor, infrastructure contracts are often abandoned and administration staff are fired. On top of that, corruption has plagued the mayoral committee during the tender process.”
There’s some high-minded blather about separating the bidding process from politics. Good luck with that.
“The decay of Johannesburg goes beyond broken pipes and sink holes. In the city center, entire 15-story buildings are hijacked by criminal syndicates or squatters who refuse to pay for services or rent.” Gangs will just dump bodies in the building to let them rot in place.
When competent government and dedication to the rule of law gives way to a spoils system, decay inevitably follows, either in Johannesburg or in America’s deep blue inner cities…