Speaker 1: What's going on.
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smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for
your support. So I started in the last hour talking
about Rui Teshera, who is a Democrat strategist guy, and
he was the one that came up with the demographics
is destiny.
Speaker 1: Tactic or strategy.
Speaker 2: He articulated this in a book like twenty years ago,
and it essentially promised Democrats power in perpetuity if we
just wait long enough for all of the white Republicans
to die off and be replaced. And that has turned
out to be not true because Donald Trump and so
he has a piece talking about the Democrats' strategy on USAID.
But also just more generally, the doge dudes as I'm
calling them, like the reaction by the Democrats and media.
But I repeat myself, the reaction to the identification of
hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse
by Democrats has been confusing to people like to share.
Who is saying like, this is not a good position
to be taking. Donald Trump actually has the high ground
here because Americans are not fond of number one bureaucrats,
number two foreign aid. And you can say it's only
one percent of the budget. People don't care.
Speaker 1: Trust me.
Speaker 2: I have had these discussions for over a decade with people.
They do not care. It doesn't matter. It's a principal thing.
They don't want anybody going anywhere. And you could talk
about soft power. I did this last week when all
of this stuff first started coming out. USAID was initially
a program designed to maximize soft power, you know, rather
than invading a country, conquering them, you know, bending them
to our will or anything like that. It was simply, hey,
you guys need some help, we'll help you out. And
then you put your name on everything, and so they
know that it was America that helped you, right, and
then that creates in marketing what they call a halo effect,
and people look at you more favorably. So that was
the whole point the problem is it became this forty
billion dollar bohemoth that has virtually no accountability. Oh and
by the way, not for nothing, what the hell is
up with all the Inspectors General. These are people who
have their jobs specifically to root out waste, fraud and
abuse inside the particular agencies where.
Speaker 1: They are assigned.
Speaker 2: How is it that Elon Musk and a couple of
twenty year old doge dudes can go in there and
identify hundreds of billions of dollars in this stuff within days,
and the IG in every one of these agencies hasn't
been able to figure any of this stuff out. And
they've been there for years, right the whole that the
whole apple is worms, to paraphrase Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: To share.
Speaker 2: Oh and by the way, yes, I was going to
get into more of RUI to share his comments, but
then Tony called and I hadn't talked to Tony since
the election. I don't know why he hasn't called more
frequently since the election, but anyway, so he called back
in and apparently Tony is now maga. I don't think
he uh, I don't think he saw where that was going.
Speaker 1: So I do have some messages.
Speaker 2: Scott says, Tony was hoping to bait you into an agreement,
but you were too savvy for his little game.
Speaker 1: Very very satisfying.
Speaker 2: Now I just need to figure out how to do
that with my wife, that is na Scott. I don't
think it works in marriage like that. But good luck
to you, sir. Seth says, I love hearing people like
Tony wanting instant change from Trump, who has been in
office for what twenty four days? Tony, what did Joe
and Kamala do for poor people in the four years
they were given the chance? Good grief? Yeah, this this
is a this is a common refrain. I hear like
they're they're they're bleeding on about the price of eggs.
How about the boys eggs? Like, Okay, first off, there
was like the bird flu that broke out, you know,
that whole bird flu thing, and they had to slaughter
a whole bunch of chickens.
Speaker 1: And that was under Biden.
Speaker 2: And also Trump's been in office for three weeks and
you think that like he sets the price of eggs
or something like these These things take time to work,
you know, like these fiscal policies and stuff, they they
take time but messages of certainty and a consistent standard
helped give confidence to markets and industries and so those things.
And when you say we're gonna open everything up for
more energy production like the like the futures, markets respond
because they are looking to the future. And so you
will see some of this stuff starting to flash that.
Now I don't know what happens with the tariffs, like
that's you know, tariffs are going to increase prices, that's
what That's what happens because the other countries are going
to respond with their own tariffs. Like New Course Steel
today sent out a message saying to all of the
builders that use their rebar and stuff, like, hey, our
prices are going to be going up because all the
tariffs on steel, So construction is going to get more expensive.
Speaker 1: And like that.
Speaker 2: Just prepare yourself because that's what's coming. And that's going
to be one of the lines of attack. Now back
to the ruly to Share a piece, he says, democrats
are and this is a democrat, by the way, Ruly
to share. Democrats are unconditionally defending an obscure government institution
at USAID at a time when even well known and
previously trusted institutions are regarded with intense suspicion. Right think
about that. People don't even know what USAID is about.
They have no idea what this thing is, why was
set up, what it does. Why do you think they're
going to have a level of content, ffidence and trust
in that institution when their trust and confidence in institutions
that they do know about have been completely obliterated over
the last five years eight years. A key finding from
a New York Times poll in twenty twenty four during
the election cycle was that voters overwhelmingly believe that the
political and economics system in America needs either major changes
or needs to be completely rebuilt. That's what they see
Trump doing. And I will tell you as one like
in twenty fifteen when Trump was running initially the first time,
I was a Rand Paul supporter, I wanted Ran Paul
because Rand Paul wanted to reduce the footprint of the
executive branch. He said that the executive branch has become
too powerful right the administrative state. He wanted to rip
apart that push all of that power back to the
legislative branch where it was originally intended to rest. And
he was the only one saying that stuff, this version
of Donald Trump two point zero, he is delivering the
things that I wanted at a rand pall, And so
I recognize what it is that he's doing.
Speaker 1: Will it work? God?
Speaker 2: I hope so, I really do hope so, But I
don't know, not for sure. I'm with you, like I
got to sit and wait and see how this stuff
plays out. But USAID is an obscure institution and it
does one of American voter's least favorite things, which is
provide foreign aid. Also, not only are Democrats blanket defending
an obscure institution that does something American voters don't particularly
want to, they are defending it without explaining their own priorities. Right,
They're not getting up there, like they cannot get up
there and defend all of the grants that USAID has
been pushing out. They can't do it, and so they
make it about these other things. They make it about, oh,
the starving children in Africa. In Africa, Well, if that's
all USAID was doing, then there wouldn't be all of
these other grants that have been identified, and there wouldn't
be such outrage about all of those other grants. But
if you're not going to stand with us and say
that's inappropriate. We need to be you know, defunding the
you know, transgender Morocco reading group.
Speaker 1: Well, then then.
Speaker 2: You're saying you just want to keep funding this stuff
and you want the corruption to continue, which is basically
what they're saying. All Right, if you're listening to this show,
you know I try to keep up with all sorts
of current events, and I know you do too, And
you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources.
Why Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which
is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's
an app and it's a website and it combines news
from a around the world in one place so you
can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it
out at check dot ground, dot news slash Pete. I
put the link in the podcast description too. I started
using ground News a few months ago and more recently
chose to work with them as an affiliate because it
lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom.
The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored
by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check
dot Ground, dot news slash Pete. Subscribe through that link
and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use
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Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports ground news as they make the media landscape
more transparent. Democrats, I have a question, why are you
guys so uninterested in rooting out government waste?
Speaker 1: What's the problem?
Speaker 2: Why why don't you care if we're spending hundreds of
billions of dollars all over the globe and wait till
this stuff, wait till the doge dudes gets into uh
or they get into the domestic agencies. I mean, you
guys are always talking about the bloated military budget. Do
you really think the doge is going to find no
waste inside the DoD budget? I bet they do. And
by the way, I'm here for that too, Like I
expect there to be a very large amount of waste, fraud,
and abuse inside that budget. And when you say get
rid of that, I will be right there with you
to say, yes, get rid of that too. But why
don't you want to get rid of all of the
other agencies waste? Right, unless, of course, you agree with
the waste you want the waste the abuse because we
now have all of the receipts, we have the records,
and we're getting more and more and more of them,
of all of the various connections, as I've outlined last week,
how the taxpayer money gets confiscated, then flows through the
grant programs and then makes their way down to these
NGOs and these various organizations that are staffed by you
and your friends. And so it kind of looks like
you're personally enriching yourselves at the taxpayer trough. And that
might explain to me. And I'm trying to, you know,
give the benefit of the doubt. I'm trying to keep
an open mind here as to why there is just
this visceral pushback on the identification of waste in government
spending like.
Speaker 1: And I'm really it's a.
Speaker 2: Head scratcher for me, except of course for the you know,
personally enriching yourself. But I don't want to make any accusations.
I've got the evidence. Ed Morrissey at hodair dot com.
He says, you know who loves USAID and its unaccountable structure,
the progressive academia elite that run it, and other less
than responsive federal bureaucracies. Why it appeals to their elitism
and the flow of money without accountability allows for massive
manipulations and social engineering. You know who hates USAID and
other less than accountable federal bureaucracies like almost literally everybody else,
Almost everybody else hates this. To address Ruy to share
his third point, where he says that Democrats are defending
an obscure institution that does something American voters don't want
to do. He says it's worth noting. Morrisey says it's
worth noting that Democrats have a different strategy altogether. They
want to preserve the structure as is, not offer any
kind of priority sets that would necessarily prompt scale down decisions.
They're using the time tested and usually successful strategy of
victim naming, or if you will, what he calls the
poster child strategy. I called this the Mott Bailey, the
Mott and Bailey fallacy. That's how I described it last week,
which is, you know, an easily defensible position, that's the Mott.
Think of a castle, right, the bailey is the fields
all around the castle, right where the farming takes place
in the old medieval kind of set up there, and
so the bailey is a more easily attacked argument and
the mott is the easily defended one. And so people
will go out and they'll do something or they'll say something,
they'll make an argument. They're out on the bailey, they
get attacked, and then they retreat to the mot and
they're like, but we just want to feed starving children
in Africa, and then the attack are like, oh, well,
I mean that's okay, but down on the bailey, that's
where you've got the you know, the funding for the
Guatemalan sex changes, and that's a controversial thing, that's indefensible.
We shouldn't be funding that stuff as American taxpayers. That's
really a thing that we were funding. By the way,
I'm not making that up, like the things that we
have been funding that they have identified through USAID, including terrorist.
Speaker 1: Organizations and the like.
Speaker 2: Like you would think it was out of a parody
I would say Saturday Night Live, but that hasn't been
funny in a long time. So it's like the Babylon B,
Like these are things that you would expect to see
in some mockery posts from the Babylon B, but we
actually have been funding them that's the bailey, and then
when attacked for funding the Guatemalan sex changes, they retreat
to the mott we're only feeding starving children, a more
easily defensible position. He calls it ed Morrisey calls it
the poster child strategy.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: He says he expected this would happen when these programs
got exposed. The Democrats and the protection racket media would
cherry pick a handful of worthy spending decisions as a
way to defend the whole corrupt structure. And that's what
we have seen with references to a couple of medical
trials right which actually should have been under the NIH,
not USAID poverty programs that'll disrupt real humanitarian efforts. And
that's assuming that the money reached those recipients in the
first place, which we don't even know that to be
the case. Less than five percent of USAID's HATI program
spending actually got to Haitians, less than five percent. Where
else did the money go? Clinton Global Initiative. Anybody, here's
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I have some messages on Twitter. The Hellian says, uh,
constitutional crisis is the new danger to democracy. Yes, they've
been using this term that they're trying to make it
happen like fetch, you know, and they may be as successful.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: But it's interesting too if you track, like when the
narrative of the democracy really ramped up, you know, within
the last five years, you can see a lot of
the NGOs and these nonprofits started putting the word democracy
into their grant applications, and it was like opening the
spigots for the for the funding, you know, like you
put that in there.
Speaker 1: And it's like gold, you know, like almost literally.
Speaker 2: Another message, this is from a Twitter user called former
poll Dancer, who says, Pete, when you put people into
a position of power without accountability, you create the opportunity
for corruption. We need a sufficiently difficult method that it
won't be abused, but simple enough that it's not impossible
to hold judges accountable. I don't pretend to know exactly
how to put that method together, though. Yeah, that is
the challenge, because you do want judges to be able to,
you know, to rule without fear of retribution for any opinion.
But I think if you get a track record built
up of constantly getting overturned on legal grounds, right on
constitutional grounds, and you've shown yourself, you know, unable to
weigh constitutional arguments, then you probably shouldn't have the gig anymore.
Russ says the left needs to lean into the constitutional
crisis narratives. I know several people who don't pay much
attention to politics but have come to realize constitutional crisis
means the left just doesn't like it. Same for worse
than Civil War, as well as Hitler and Watergate Horribleizing
everything is a strategy with diminishing returns.
Speaker 1: That is correct.
Speaker 2: Russ goes on to say, those people are saying, if
there was an actual problem, Democrats would address the facts,
not just wait that it's not just waiale, that it's
the same as some other awful thing. Right, I address
the thing that is at issue. And you know, there's
this identification of all of this waste, and your response
is to attack the people that have identified the waste.
Got a message here from Dennis the this is a
peat male, He says, I'm having fun watching these Democrats
protesting Trump's doge findings of all the corruption and wasteful
spending in the federal government. Once again, it's another exercise
of the modus operandi, which is to first create the problem,
then second claimed you want to fix it. This really
does make great comedy, especially when you have Aunt Esther's
replica Maxine Waters leading the way.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's always good for a laugh, and John says,
good show today, Pete, I have learned much.
Speaker 1: Thank you, John.
Speaker 2: I appreciate that Ed Morrissey, who I always learned from
as well. This is a piece over at hotair dot Com.
Liberal analyst warrens Democrats it's suicide to defend USAID. He says,
the obvious point is Congress could restore funding for any
worthy efforts at USAID that the administration has terminated. There
are no legitimate reasons that the funds for worthy projects
should have to come out of a slush fund that
defeats accountability, both fiscal and political.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: This is It's the same argument I make on teacher pay.
I said this last week. I want great teachers to
make a lot of money, six figures. I want them
really well paid, But I refuse to be held hostage
and pay the bad teachers the same amount of money
as the great ones get paid. I'm not going to
do that, And you can't make me pay for good
things at the expense of having to fund way more
terrible things. Ed Morrissey asks why aren't Democrats in Congress
stepping up with proposals to specifically fund any USAID projects? Right, So,
if you identify one that you want to keep, run
a bill, say okay, you know what you're going to
You're wanting to pause funding on all this Let's fund
this particular thing at this funding level. And the reason
why they're not doing is because almost all of them
would not just be on po popular, but a significant
amount of them were corrupt from the start. They don't
want to put their names on most of these specific programs,
nor have their support for those programs on the record,
which is why USAID got set up as an unaccountable
slush fund in the first place. They don't want their
fingerprints on it. On a larger scale, that's how we
got the bureaucratic state too, or the deep state, if
you prefer. That goes back a century to the first
wave of progressive policies when Woodrow Wilson and after his strokes,
his wife, helped create agency law to bypass the Constitution
and to grandize the executive branch at the expense of
the legislative branch. Wilson argued that experts could craft laws
better than elected representatives, and legislators eventually embraced this dereliction
of their duty. That's why we're in this mess. Trump's
actions now leverage that overwhelming executive authority to dismantle at
least some of the bureaucratic state, starting with the least
popular outposts of the United bureaucracies of America. Democrats won't
address foreign aid priorities because they're not defending foreign aid,
they're defending the bureaucratic state. That should be obvious at
this point now. On Friday, a Trump appointed judge Carl Nichols,
a federal district court in Washington, d C. Temporarily paused
Trump's directives placing about twenty seven hundred USAID employees on
administrative leave and evacuating them from their host countries on
an expedited basis. The objections were raised by government employee unions,
which we really shouldn't even have either. When we look
closely at the order, Judge Nichols is not saying that
the Trump administration will not eventually be able to do
what the president wants done. Rather, the judge's concern is
whether it reparable harm will result from the abrupt manner
in which employees who continue to be paid have been
cut off from USAID information systems and they've been told
to evacuate. And this is where he said, you know,
evacuating out Assyria is not like, you know, having to
leave your job at the office in Virginia.
Speaker 1: It's not the same. So does this hold water? All right?
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So I mentioned before the break, Judge Carl Nichols Trump
appoint e Washington DC Federal District Court temporarily paused the
directives putting a bunch of USAID employees on paid administrative
leave and evacuating them from their host countries. The judge's
concern is over getting some of them out of some
of those locations. So the government's going to have to
address particular perils faced by employees in unstable countries, as
well as those who have special needs kids, property other
considerations at risk. If the evacuation is carried out too hastily,
But these things can be worked out, Andy McCarthy at
National Reviews. As constitutionally speaking, I believe Trump is going
to prevail as the litigation moves forward, quite possibly up
to the US Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: Julie Kelly has a copy of the sworn declaration to
the court by Pete Morocco, who oversees USAID for President Trump.
He says, I made numerous requests for information about USAID's operations,
programs and compliance with the President's directives. I have consistently
found USAID senior staff were unwilling or unable to provide
basic compliance and oversight information. For example, senior professionals in
the finance, legal and human capital groups, so human resources
were not able to identify who, when, and why. Dozens
of very specific multimillion dollar payments were approved or dispersed
in the day's following Trump's directives to pause the disbursements. Right,
So think about what that means is that Trump says
paused the disbursements, and they pushed out the door multimillion
dollar payments in direct violation of that order. That's in
subordination at the very least no. This lack of clear
or timely information sharing caused grave concern about whether USAID
was faithfully following the presidents and Secretary of State Rubio's directives.
Those concerns were amplified when agency leadership became aware that
a group of USAID employees were not complying with the
executive order and continued to permit new funding obligations that
were paused by the directives. So this goes all the
way up to the top. The leadership was like, yeah,
keep doing it. By February one, the administration had placed
one hundred and fifteen USAID officials on paid leave for
non compliance and other acts of insubordination. The plan was
for all but roughly six hundred out of the roughly
four thousand, seven hundred and sixty five full time USAID
employees to be put on leave as Morocco and his
team analyzed foreign projects, but that was thwarted by this
judge's temporary restraining order. By the way, Morocco also took
a swipe at the judge's unsubstantiated claim that USAID employees
in Syria faced imminent danger. He said, to the best
of my knowledge, none of these employees were located in
high risk countries like Perhaps Nichols would have learned that
had he allowed the DOJ to respond to the lawsuit
before issuing his temporary restraining order, but he did not.
Morocco also identified one USAID employee who defied the directive
related to assistance funding for Gaza. Quote one USAID employee
who broke that chain of command, did not communicate with
her immediate USAID supervisor and attempted to obligate or authorize
the expenditure of nearly half a billion dollars in assistance
in a manner that was inconsistent with the President's priorities.
So she's trying to push out the door half a
billion dollars to Gaza in direct violation of what the
President ordered. Meanwhile, in Manhattan Court, Federal Court, Southern District
of New York, Judge Paul Engelmeyer has paused the act
excess of the DOGE to what are described as sensitive
Treasury Department records. By the way, DOGE is an overhaul
of the existing US Digital Service, which was put in
place by Barack Obama poisted on his own petard. There
the stated concern of that judge an Obama appointee. Is
that doge's access to sensitive records carries a high risk
of improper disclosure or hacking, and these concerns are echoed
in the media I'm sure just a coincidence, and in
the New York Times op ed by five former Treasury
Department secretaries. So political actors can't be trusted. We need
the altruistic, professional bureaucrats who aren't it all partisan. They
can be trusted. You see the disconnect here, It's pretty obvious.
All right, that'll do it for this episode.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 2: I could not do the show without your support and
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thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.