Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for
your support. David Asman is a reporter at Fox, and
he sent out a tweet he says more than two
years ago, and he links to this tweet from two
years ago talking about one hundred and eighty nine billion
dollars in k through twelve COVID spending one hundred eighty
nine billion dollars, and he asked where did that money go?
He says, I never really thought that we would get
an answer, but now Doge is giving us a glimpse.
You may want to sit down for some of this.
This was Nick literally just sat down. Okay. Three hundred
and ninety three thousand dollars was used to rent out
a major League baseball stadium. I don't know which stadium.
I don't know what for, but that's apparently where some
of this money went. And by the way, they are
finding all of this stuff because of AI. Okay, these
guys that went in there, these doge dudes, the Musketeers,
they are in there and they have written AI codes
and such and programs to scrape this data and to
connect these the dots for the funding. And that's how
they've been able to track some of this stuff. And
this was the problem with you'll recall some of the
other departments where they were not coding things, which makes
the money untraceable and unauditable because you don't know where
the money is gone. So three hundred and ninety three
thousand dollars to rent out a Major League Baseball stadium,
this was COVID money, remember, And up in Raleigh a
couple of weeks ago, they were like, we're going to
have to raise taxes or maybe go for a bond
reference or something. They're like or and they were canceling
classes because their HVAC systems weren't working correctly, so they
couldn't have the kids safely in the schools because the
HVAC systems were broken. But they got millions of dollars
to upgrade their HVAC components in their schools. What do
they do with the money? That's what we were told. Remember,
in fact, I was saying this at the time when
Mandy Cohen, who's got it going on? When she I mean,
that was the song that's some nutball made for her.
But anyway, she was talking about the three ws. Remember,
do you remember what the three w's where everybody, let
me talk to you like you're a child, the three ws,
wash your hands, wear a mask, and wait six feet apart.
You know, I said, you're leaving out the most important
W and that is wind, breeze, air circulation, ventilation, windows,
whatever you want to say. But add a fourth W there, right,
because that's the most important thing. It's to open up
these spaces. Get your air circulating, to blow the lung
juice out of the air, suck it out and blow
it outside. Because when you speak, you get micro droplets
that come out of your lungs that are expelled into
the air. And these things are so small they just
stay suspended in the air, and as you're talking to
somebody then and these go through the masks and so
then other people walk in they can inhale them, which
is really really gross. And that's why I don't talk
to people in person anymore, and I don't listen to
people ever. So you live by your own code. So
three hundred ninety three k for a stadium, eighty six
thousand dollars for hotel rooms at Caesar's Palace. Don't know
what this is for. This is just what this reporter
has found through the DOGE receipts. Sixty thousand dollars spent
for swimming pool passes. Again, don't know what that's for.
That's the kind of stuff that they are are finding.
Monica says, it's all infuriating, and I completely agree. Last
hour I went over this real clear investigations piece. It
was actually from now almost three years ago Hemingway and
Ben Weingarten of how the Social Security Administration collects data
that could help us identify identity thieves. But because the
thievery is occurring for largely illegal aliens, they don't want
to look at it. They don't want to use the data,
they don't want to share the data. Immigration advocates downplay
the criminally the criminality involved. They report most workers are
buying documents they believe to be false. A representative of
the National Immigration Law Center told the LA Times, there
isn't really any intention of stealing somebody's identity when they
intentionally steal an identity. No, No, they think they're getting
fake numbers. See. They don't realize they're buying, you know,
a three year old child's number, or somebody else's number
who you know is then going to get hit with
a criminal record. I don't realize that somebody else's numbers. See.
So they're kind of victims to the everify system adopted
fifteen years ago, but the program is not mandatory. The
DHS run program compares employment eligibility information from I nine
forms to government records. It remains required only of federal contractors.
Only a small minority of states have mandated its use
for employee employers. Rather, they conclude their peace. The populist
turn of the post Donald Trump Republican Party is appealing
to working class voters with a strong interest curbing illegal
immigration to put upward pressure on wages. Recent elections also
show Hispanics voting for Republicans in significantly higher numbers, in
part because of the democrats more liberal border policies. Again,
this was from June twenty ninth, twoenty twenty two. And
then there's the Department of Education. Shall we let's Donald
Trump has said he's gonna either eradicate it or reform
it greatly. Christopher Rufo, writing at Cityjournal dot org, says,
while Republican presidents have long promised to reduce the size
of government, they have usually failed to do so. The
bureaucracy always wins. This time, though, might be different. The
second Trump administration has been surprisingly aggressive in its efforts
to reform federal agencies, including a controlled demolition of us
AID and an audacious buy out plan for government employees.
And Elon Musk, the leader of the DOGE, has a
long track record of successful and sometimes extreme cost cutting.
When Musk took over Twitter, he fired eighty percent of
the employees and at the same time manage to improve
the product and increase its profitability. The next stage of
the conflict between Trump and the bureaucracy looks to be
the Department of Education, which the President has correctly identified
as a hotbed of left wing ideologies. And again that
is correct, and that's what makes it so important to
root out because they are training the future generations of America,
and when you get this cancer of Marxist ideology into
the schools, it will corrode the entire society. It will
take a while, but the Marxists have always known that
it is a long march through the institutions. It is
a project that honestly is never, never finally achieved. There's
always the work. Almost every Republican pre residential candidate since
nineteen eighty has promised to shrink it or abolish the department,
but its budget has only grown. When Trump made the
same promise on the campaign trail last year, Chris Rufo says,
I was skeptical, but Musk changes the calculation. What is
the best way to proceed? The administration has to understand
that the DOE administers three primary activities college student student
loans and grants K twelve funding and ideological production. Okay,
those are the three things, according to Rufo, the Department
of Education administers. And then he offers a blueprint. We'll
go over it in a minute. 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
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and it combines news from around the world in one
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I started using ground News a few months ago and
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I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to
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but it also supports ground News as they make the
media landscape more transparent. Christopher Ruffo, writing at Cityjournal dot
org City dash Journal dot org, he points out the
administration to understand right the three primary activities that the
Department of Ed does that they administer student loans K
twel funding ideological production that includes an array of programs, grants,
civil rights initiatives, third party NGOs that create left wing
content to push on local schools. Right, it is not
possible or desirable to shut down all three functions at
the same time, he says. Rather, the Secretary of Education,
Linda McMahon, in partnership with Musk and Doge, should handle
each separately. First, spin off the college loan program. Spin
off the loans and the grants, put them in an
independent financial entity. Right. The federal government right now backstops
one point six trillion dollars in student loans owns every year.
It issues another one hundred and ten billion in student aid.
That is a massive portfolio. Put it aside, get some
other group to administer that with risk analysts and cost cutters.
They should reform that portfolio and shift as much of
it as possible back to the private market and restrict
the total number of loans, which is partially responsible for
the administrative bloat and the student debt crisis. Okay, that's
what's driving it. Thank you Obamacare, by the way for
that number two K twelve. In cooperation with Congress, they
need to block grant the ED Departments, or the ED
as I call it, the K twelve, the ED K
twelve funding programs block grant it. The department sends one
hundred billion dollars to state governments and local school districts
every year. They attach restrictions ideological conditions. The Biden administration
tried to use the federal money to push race and
gender politics into local school districts. Okay, So instead of
legitimizing that kind of coercive power, Rufo says, the administration
should simply tally up all of the K twelve expenditures
divided by state population and disperse disperse the result to
each state with no strings attached. Just here's your money, done. Done.
States can continue to use the funding for meals, low
income schools, special education, right whatever, but they will have
the flexibility to do so in a way that meets
their local needs. Third, the ideological production element, They need
to just shut that down and terminate the employment of
bureaucrats who run them. This department maintains a sprawling network
of ideological centers through its research programs. Right, the vast
array of non government organizations the NGOs, which survive on
ED funding and promote left wing identity activism. These groups
have become hotbeds of progressive identity politics, promoting theories of
systemic racism, right the idea that men can turn into women.
These activities do not serve the public good. They do
not serve public subsidy or deserve public subsidy, especially so
under a conservative government that is now in charge, who
promised to put an end to critical race theory and
gender ideology in the federal government. Also, the Department of
Education has their Office of Civil Rights Office for Civil Rights.
While ostensibly serving a noble purpose, it has been used
as a battering ram to promote left wing ideologies. Take
their core functions and move them over to the Department
of Justice. Get it out of the Department of Education,
send it over to DOJ, where the administration can provide
the oversight without the Department of Education's left wing idel
logs and civil rights apparatricks. He says it is unlikely
that you can just scrap the Department of Education without
specific legislation or at minimum and agreement by Congress to
delegate reorganization authority to the president, as it did regularly
between nineteen thirty two and nineteen eighty four, So you're
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This is from Hans Mankey is the author of a
book called Swift Voting America. Okay. He says, there's a
lot to choose from, but arguably the most important breakthrough
in Trump two point zero, especially for the long term
strength of the Mega movement, is the total collapse of
emotional blackmail as a weapon. The total collapse of emotional
blackmail as a weapon the media democrats, but I repeat myself,
and elites once wielded it to great effect, but not anymore.
Jd Vance's offhand remark, I don't really care, Margaret. Remember
that it wasn't just a moment. Manky says, it was
the perfect encapsulation of our new reality. The guilt trips,
the manufactured outrage, the pressure campaigns that once dictated the
terms of debate simply do not work anymore, and they're
not coming back Democrats, They're not coming back. And this
is something like in my role, in my job and
what I've been doing, you know, for the better part
of now, well over a decade, I've been called all
sorts of names. So this emotional blackmail hasn't worked on
me in a very, very, very long time. But I
recognize that it does work on people who are not
in this position. People are trying to keep their jobs
by not talking about certain things, and so they are
very worried about these accusations. People of older generations who
are very worried about certain words being used about them
and against them say it's the thing like, I'm with
Vance on this. I don't really care, Margaret, I don't care.
You can say whatever you want to say. I'm done
playing your emotional blackmail game. He is, And I agree
one hundred percent with this. I think this is the difference.
So the time is now to start ripping out this
insanity in the Department of Education is just the latest
target here. If you're going to do any kind of
bold reform, public support is crucial, okay, to maintain American's approval,
the Trump administration, according to Chris Ruffo, has to explain
that college students are still going to be able to
get loans. K twelve will still get their money, civil
rights will still be protected under the DOJ. This ensures
that the argument can be focused on eliminating deeply unpopular
and divisive left wing ideologies, just like Musk has already
done at USAID. The time is now, the president is
in his first one hundred days, and major change is
best enacted when an administration enjoys high public app approval.
Musk understands also that hesitation signals weakness. Now, Rufo in
another piece over at his own website, Christopher Rufo dot com,
he adds to this. He says, over the first thirty days,
the DOGE method has come to resemble a seek and
destroy mission. Musk dispatched small teams of lawyers, engineers, and
human resource specialists to government agencies told them to cut
wasteful spending and needless ideological programs. Musk seems to have
identified two switches, payments and personnel, and these provide the
greatest leverage. The DOGE teams have quickly organized a reduction
in force and canceled billions of dollars in government contracts,
two steps that reduce spending and reverse the process of
left wing capture. This reflects a number of important developments. First,
national politics is highly online. Now, people, it's like, oh,
Twitter is not real life. Hmmm ah. I don't know.
Maybe we're getting to a point of singularity here. But
Musk's Twitter or x shaping the discourse. Now, journalists circulate
ideas on social media government officials and put them into action,
sometimes within hours. The process creates a virtuous circle, with journalists, policymakers,
and technologists making information public and taking corrective action as necessary.
The other notable development is the speed. Unlike government bureaucrats,
Musk and the Doge team operate at a lightning fast tempo.
Their stated admission is to cancel billions of dollars in
government contracts every day. These initial strikes at the Department
of Education could be the opening for a broader fight.
The public can now see that the department functions in
part as a patronage scheme for left wing ideologies. That
is correct, It is a patronage program. In all of
the reporting that I have been covering over the last
three weeks here right, I keep hammering away at that
this is a shadow government it is a jobs program.
It is a patronage system. People move in and out
into the NGO that gets the government money. And then
when their party, the Democrats, assume control again of the
government levers of power, they then move back into the government.
They enriched their friends, they enrich their NGOs, They promote
their agenda, their shared ideology. Then if they lose and
they're out, they move back to the NGO circuit and
they reap those rewards. And there was a perfect example
of it with the Green New Deal. In our old
pal Stacey Abrams. Remember her two billion dollars in taxpayer
funds got set aside for a nonprofit linked to her,
the former perennial Georgia Democrats candidate for governor. Right, Stacy
Abrams or I guess she ran for she ran for senator.
Something to do. I don't know. She's run for a lot.
The Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration awarded a
two billion dollar grant to a group called Power Forward Communities.
This was part of the agency's greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program.
Power Forward Communities got the grant despite the fact that
it was founded just four months before it got the grant,
and they never managed any amount of money anywhere close
to two billion dollars. In fact, total revenue generated by
the Power Forward Communities group, you know how much it was,
total revenue one hundred dollars, one hundred dollars. I started
my podcast with more capital investment than that. Okay, Powered Forward.
Power Forward Communities grant was one of eight and now
we're learning more by the way, about some of these
other eight. But the eight grants under the Greenhouse Gas
Reduction Fund that all together total twenty billion dollars. Twenty
billion went out the door. EPA administrator Lee Zelden announced
last week that the administration, the former administration, the Biden administration,
took the twenty billion dollars and parked it in an
outside bank, in city bank. Actually they took twenty billion dollars.
They put it in a bank, and that limits the
federal government's oversight of the program. They parked it there
to protect the money from Trump so they could push
the money out the door to these eight organizations. They
propped up organizations that were specifically designed to get the
money under this program, which was in fact created to
operate as a green bank, they called it. This was
all done under the Inflation Creation Act sorry Inflation Reduction
Act of twenty twenty two. Leise Elden, the new head
of the EPA, told the Washington Freebeacon where this story
I'm reading two comes from. When we learned about the
Biden administration scheme to park twenty billion outside the agency,
we suspected some organizations were created out of thin air
just to take advantage of this, and we were right.
Power Forward Communities or PFC, was created October twenty twenty three.
It's a coalition of groups led by Rewiring America. That is,
a left wing group that advocates for electrification policies and
a transition away from fossil fuel dependence. Abrams serves as
Rewiring America's senior council and she said she was thrilled
to be part of the Powered Forward Communities coalition. Power
Forward Communities has a large number of partners on its website.
Among its partners are the Southern Economic Advancement Project. Another
is called Fair count. These are left wing nonprofits founded
by Abrams in the wake of her electoral victory sorry
defeat in twenty eighteen. The Southern Economic Advancement Project seeks
to boost racial equity and economic power in the South,
and it is fiscally sponsored as a project of the
Tides Center, which is connected to George Soros. Surprise, surprise,
All right, I hope you had a happy holiday season.
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then somebody says, hey, Dad, remember those old VHS tapes?
Did you ever get them transferred? And then the room
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you know, well, I've been meaning to but I just
having gotten around to it. Look, don't let those priceless
memories sit in a box for another year. All right.
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online at create a Video dot Com. Power Forward Communities
has a list of partners that also includes the American
Federation of Teachers the AFL CIO as well. Shortly before
leaving office, Biden's EPA parked twenty billion dollars in City
Bank and an account at Citibank. It has been located
by Lee Zelden and the new leadership at the EPA.
This is a patronage scandal of a size never witnessed
in American history. The dollar figures alone, this twenty billion
is you know, tip of the Iceberg type stuff. The arrangement,
because it's in a City Bank account, means the Trump
administration cannot claw it back. They can't. They can't. They're
trying to retrieve the funds, but it's going to be problematic.
But wait, there's more. The senior Biden Administration official tasked
with directing former President Joe Biden's twenty seven billion dollar
climate grant program. Okay, this GGRF, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction
Fund Right, twenty seven billion dollar program oversaw a five
billion dollar grant from the program to his former employer,
same fund, a guy by the name of Jahi Wise
joined the EPA in December of twenty twenty two as
the founding director of the newly created GGRF. In April,
so like four months later, while Wise served in that role,
the EPA anounced it was going to be giving GGRF
grants totally twenty billion dollars to eight nonprofits, including one
called the Coalition for Green Capital CGC that is a Washington,
DC based group. It got five billion dollars. I mean,
that's no Stacy Abrams linked, you know, twenty billion, but
still five billion. As part of the announcement, it's also
the place where green or sorry, where Wise previously worked.
He was the director of policy there and there's no
indication that he recused himself from the grant giving process.
He left that gig at the Coalition for Green Capital
to join the Biden Whitehouse in twenty twenty one, then
he joined the EPA less than two years later. They
just move them around, just move them around. The grant
that went to CGC and Wyse's involvement is also notable
because former Biden administration David Hayes served on the CGC board.
Hayes rejoined the group's board in October of twenty twenty two,
so before Wyse went over to work at the EPA.
Hayes joined the board after he had served as a
Special Assistant to the President in the White House Climate
Policy Office for about a year and a half, meaning
Hayes and Wise were close colleagues at the White House
for just about two years. On Tuesday, Denise Chung, the
top criminal prosecutor in the Washington DCUs Attorney's office, was
forced to resign after she declined to open a grand
jury investigation into this program's funding. Quote. The story of
the Biden's EPA gold bars never stops, said Lee Zelden.
The waste and abuse was so deep deeply interwoven in
the last administration that not only did the leaders who
oversaw this not bad and eye at billions of taxpayer
dollars going towards partisan pet projects, but serious conflicts of
interest were also ignored and that should have raised red flags.
And again this all went to that private account and
that limits the federal oversight. This was a first of
its kind arrangement. By the way, this parking of money
like this. Shortly before Wise departed the agency is when
he did it. September twenty twenty four, Wise joined the
nonprofit Open Society Institute. That's George Soros's institute. That's his nonprofit.
He's a leadership in Government fellow. He's got an eighteen
month fellowship. They just keep moving them around, keeping them paid,
keeping them paid, keeping him in the mix, keeping him
in the flow, and then he'll be ready to transfer
back into a government role or a nonprofit role in
order to continue the ideological spread. Overall. And by the way,
this is a report from the Washington Freebeacon, which is
a national treasure Freebeacon dot com. Overall, the GGRF is
the single largest non tax investment within the twenty twenty
two Inflation Reduction Act. The program was created by Democrats
to act as a green bank, directing billions of dollars
in taxpayer funds to intermediaries which then finance green energy
and environmental justice projects across America. It was criticized when
it was made by Republicans and energy experts. They said,
its size, its scope, it's going to lead to government
waste and abuse. And they said that while massive, the
program would actually have very little impact on climate change.
A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Benjamin Zeiker, said, quote,
it really has nothing to do with climate The obvious
objective of the program is the provision of large subsidies
to favored interest groups. Let me see here, Thomas says,
please stop, Pete. My wife is screaming at the radio
because of your reporting on Doge. We have been reading
about all the fraud, waste and abuse Elon and the
Musketeers have been finding, but hearing your report it on
air makes the corruption even more real. Now, at thirty
days in, I believe she has become maxed out on
all of the winning. Not me, but I am afraid
she and others maybe showing the initial symptoms of Doge
derangement syndrome. Great reporting, Kevin says, you may have already
said this, but I just had an epiphany. Finding socials
in the system that have paid into the system for
years but of not fatal tax return is an e
the way to find socials that are being used fraudulently.
Anybody in their right mind that is a genuine social
is definitely going to file a tax return to get
a refund. Yeah they Yeah, Kevin, You're right. They can
find this stuff if they want to. They are choosing
not to the bureaucracy and the people that are in
control of it through whatever administration takes over. Right, they
do not want to find this stuff, and that's why
the work that the DOGE people are doing is so
important to our Dare I say democracy? All right, that'll
do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.
I could not do the show without your support and
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while I'm gone.