Elon Musk Tells The Bureaucrats To Explain What They Do

Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.

Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2025

During my career, I worked for government agencies at various times as an employee, a conttactor, and an employee of private companies who performed work on site at government agencies. I would say that the problem of staff who have no discernible duties is universal, hardly limited to government, although it's more visible there.

I recall some years ago reading an account of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's time as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 1982 and 1990. According to Wikipedia, he was credited with improving the efficiency of the EEOC. Settlement award amounts to victims of discrimination tripled, while the number of suits filed decreased.

The account I read, but haven't been able to find now, said that one of his techniques for doing this was to go down to the cafeteria in the mornings and insist that the employees finish their coffee and go back to the office. I thought of this sometime later when I was working for a quasi-government agency that was in a building with a cafe on the ground floor. I would often go down there for lunch, but not for much else.

One day, the proprietor came to my table and asked, "Do you work for XYZ upstairs?"

"Yes," I said.

"Do you know you're the only one who works there who isn't down here all day long? You come down for lunch, and that's it."

I know I had weekly meetings with my boss, where I was expected to do exactly what Elon Musk now says federal employees will be expected to do, give their boss a list of things they'd done over the past week. I always did this, although sometimes, as any smart subordinate would do, I maybe overstressed some of the importance of one or another item. But at each of these meetings, my boss became increasingly exasperated, picking through each item in more and more detail. "You said you did this. But how long did that really take you?"

"Maybe half an hour," I might say. "But it was one of the things I had on the project plan, and I got it done."

"But you're just setting this whole list up to make yourself look good." I didn't have much to answer -- I thought subordinates ought to be entitled to give the best account of themselves. But later I heard my boss was known for always being out in the building courtyard on a more or less permanent cigarette break.

At another job, I was working for the company I've described here before, Technology Associates. I was at a customer site as the on-site rep. The manager there one day called my boss at TA, I'm not sure why. and said, "He's one of the best workers I have. He's here on time every morning, and he gets right down to work."

My boss at TA gave me a call. "I've been hearing you get to work on time, and you get right down to work. They think very highly of you. Do you know what that says to me? It says you're trying to put yourself between TA and the customer." I thought I was supposed to make TA look good, but I knew that if I answered that, I'd be in even more trouble.

Well, the problem of employees who don't do anything isn't limited to government, but it's certainly there. Via The Atlantic,

President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk justify dismantling the civil service as cost cutting. The federal government has “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse,” Trump claimed earlier this month, and Musk has complained about a “staggering amount of waste of taxpayer money.” Their actions—a barrage of executive orders, memos, layoffs, and attempts to unilaterally eliminate entire agencies—have sparked outrage, but Musk sees that only as proof of their achievements: “They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful.”

. . . The Trump administration has created a toxic work environment. I’ve spent 25 years studying public administration and have never seen anything like the deep sense of dread that federal employees are now experiencing. I spoke with workers who feared reprisal if their names were published. One told me that there’s an “eerie” mood in the Census Bureau office: “No one can openly discuss anything.” Another civil servant said that people who’ve worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for decades are afraid and “can’t believe what’s happening.”

Press reports of Musk's demand that workers document what they've done indicate that this is simply the same thing he did when he took over Twitter in 2022.

The day before Musk closed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, which he’s re-dubbed X, he walked through the front door with a sink. Starting within hours of his takeover the following day, Musk took something like a hacksaw to the company, moves that he said were essential to “save” the company but that caused chaos.

. . . Still, while the takeover may have hurt Twitter employees, users, advertisers and – at least in one sense — Musk’s own pocketbook, it has also added to his own personal power. Over the summer, Musk used X to try to sway public opinion in favor of Trump. And since Trump’s reelection, Musk now has the president’s ear and an office in the White House — and he’s become tens of billions of additional dollars richer, on the back of expectations that his connection to Trump will benefit his empire of companies.

And for that reason, he may have little incentive to change his employment – and layoff – strategy in his new role at DOGE.

My view is that Musk simply understands how the world works and acts accordingly.

The Ukraine Policy Dilemma

A couple of recent articles at Real Clear Politics display the muddle of conventional thinking about Ukraine. In Compact, which describes itself as "an online magazine founded in 2022, seeks a new political center devoted to the common good", with Ivy Leaguers on its masthead, we find Reality Is Winning the Ukraine Narrative War:

While the Russian and Ukrainian militaries have been clashing violently on the bloody battlefields of Eastern Europe, a parallel war has long been underway in the media sphere, where armies of information warriors have battled to shape the ways Western publics think about the conflict.

The dominant army in this information war has comprised most Western governments and leading media organs, abetted by a formidable array of public relations firms working in partnership with the Ukrainian government. It has insisted that the Ukraine war is best understood as a modern-day variation of Nazi Germany’s World War II aggression, with Putin reprising the Hitlerian role of revanchist dictator seeking to grab land and dominate Europe. Unless he is stopped through resolute military force, they argue, his armies will move from Ukraine to the Baltic states, Poland, and beyond.

Arrayed against this army has been a loose band of realist experts and anti-establishment skeptics who contend that the war’s origins more closely resemble those of World War I. To varying degrees, they acknowledge that Russia’s paternalistic attitudes towards Ukraine have played a significant role in Moscow’s motivations, but they argue that the invasion is fundamentally the product of what international relations theorists call a “security dilemma.” Steps by NATO to bolster the security of its members and aspirants were perceived as threatening by Moscow. Aggressive efforts by Russia to block these moves threatened the West, producing a spiral of action and reaction that continued to escalate absent diplomatic efforts to arrest it.

This is something of a straw man good guy-bad guy narrative, whereby anti-establishment skeptics battle the evil establishment. The problem is that right now, the establishment -- for instance Foreign Affairs -- seems to be on the side of the skeptics, at least as far as NATO is concerned:

At last week’s Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting in Brussels, newly minted U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that the position of the U.S. government was that Ukraine will not join NATO. Although greeted with horror by some in Washington and in European capitals, Hegseth’s remarks were in fact more a public statement of reality than a genuine change in policy. This position had been telegraphed throughout the Trump campaign and transition, and even the Biden administration had been skeptical of Ukrainian membership any time soon. The risks of admitting Ukraine to the alliance—reflected in widespread opposition to it in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere—have long made this reality perfectly clear to all.

. . . With the Trump administration insisting that no U.S. troops be sent to Ukraine, the conversation in European capitals is increasingly focused on whether and how European states can provide “security guarantees” through their own deployments.

Yet there are reasons to doubt whether a European guarantee to provide troops is feasible, especially without substantial U.S. involvement.

. . . Kyiv itself has long been insistent that the only way to resolve this concern is to provide Ukraine with NATO membership as part of an eventual peace deal. This is ideal from Kyiv’s point of view because it offloads the problem of preventing a future war to the United States. It would also be beneficial for European states—“cost effective,” as one EU leader recently put it—as it would rely less on spending, arms, or military deployments and more on the paper guarantee provided by NATO’s Article 5.

But NATO membership for Ukraine remains unlikely in the long term and implausible in the short term.

The piece, after surmising that a peacekeeping force would require from 50,000 to 200,000 troops, which the US refuses to provide and Europe is unable to, concludes that Ukraine should guarantee its own security. But isn't this the unworkable situation we have now? Well, we'll just strengthen and rebuild Ukraine's military!

A rebuilt and adequately supplied Ukrainian military would be a formidable deterrent to Moscow, and Western support will be critical to this military rebuilding. Rather than paper promises of NATO membership—or insufficient European troop deployments—what Ukraine needs is Western partners to provide arms and funding in the case of a future war, much as these states have done for the last three years. This could even be framed as a kind of security guarantee, in that it provides training and arms to Ukraine in peacetime and aid in a future war.

But how does this differ from current policy? The piece says flat out, the US and Europe will fund a new Ukraine military "much as these states have done for the last three years". I assume that now would involve magicallly cutting out the corruption that by Zelensky's own account siphoned off 50% of that aid. Curious about what sort of mind would devise such an imaginative solution, I discovered the author, Emma Ashford,

is a Senior Fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center. She works on a variety of issues related to the future of U.S foreign policy, international security, and the politics of global energy markets.

. . . Prior to joining the Stimson Center, Ashford was a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s New American Engagement Initiative, which focused on challenging the prevailing assumptions governing US foreign policy. She was also a research fellow in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, where she worked on a variety of issues including the US-Saudi relationship, sanctions policy, and US policy towards Russia, and US foreign policy and grand strategy more broadly.

How on earth does this "challenge" the prevailing assumptions governing US foreign policy if it envisions keeping Ukraine out of NATO -- the policy of the US at least since Dubya -- and sending hundreds of billions down a continuing black hole of military aid? I think Sundance at Conservative Treehousehas a better grasp of the situation:

Elements outside our central government, likely CIA clandestine operators in coordination with GCHQ in U.K, are the leading operators on what they frame as Ukraine military operations.

. . . Sooner or later, something is bound to happen, because the desperation to retain control amid those within the IC consortium is palpable and visible. They fear President Trump and President Putin forming a geopolitical alliance and they are reacting out of fear for diminished influence.

This presents a problem for our nation. The background here is very concerning. This is why I said, “at a certain moment, likely as a part of a media question, someone is going to ask President Trump why a certain action was taken by his administration in the Ukraine conflict. President Trump will respond by saying, “we didn’t do that.” The puzzled media will repeat the question. President Trump will again say, no one in my administration did that. . . And suddenly, things will reveal.”

Biden was never in control of the Ukraine operation. This is something that started within the U.S. State Department (CIA division) long before Biden was installed. President Trump is now having to deal with a geopolitical consequence that comes from this collaborative IC operation that is obviously no longer exclusive to the USA. Other intelligence agencies are now too far enmeshed to safely retreat.

It makes sense for President Trump to start this conversation by pointing out the Zelenskyy factor within it. It was a logical prediction to look at the scope of the problem and see Zelenskyy as the Gordion knot that needs to be cut.

Trump's currentely expressed view, which I think is the only genuinely realistic one, is that Ukraine has no credible path forward:

“I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards,” Trump said of Zelensky. “He has no cards. And you get sick of it.”

“So, I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you,” Trump added. “He makes it very hard to make deals.”

Trump suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to reach a deal to end the war in Ukraine. He claimed Putin did not necessarily have to negotiate a ceasefire, because if he wanted, he’d get “the whole country.”

It looks like Trump's next steps are clear:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has few — if any — advocates in President Trump’s inner circle as the pair’s souring relationship threatens to tank Kyiv’s standing in peace talks with Russia.

. . . While the deterioration between Washington and Kyiv appears sudden, one source familiar with White House discussions told The Post Thursday: “It’s nothing new to me.

. . . The “real question is, has anyone told [Trump] they really, really like him?” the source said of the Ukrainian president.

A second source close to Trump concurred with the assessment and suggested that “the best case for [Zelensky] and the world is that he leaves to France immediately.”

I suspect this will happen soon. The alternative to the feckless dither we see on various sides of the argument is to recognize that the Ukraine war is the creation of unelected intelligence and quasi-diplomatic entities that invented the idea of a reified "Ukraine" that could defend itself without exorbitantly expensive aid that the West is no longer in a position to supply, especially when it was always assumed that the US would provide the great bulk of it.

But what about the Reimagining US Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, or the Atlantic Council’s New American Engagement Initiative, which fund people like Emma Ashford and are part of the machinery that brought us the Ukraine war in the first place? Aren't they actually also part of Musk's grift machine?

"The Grift Machine Has To Stop"

This is a quote from an interview with Elon Musk, where he referred specifically to the Ukraine war. But it occurs to me that this has been a key strategy for Trump since he returned to office.

For instance, the removal of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian migrants knocks away a key cause of the problems in places like Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA:

The Trump administration on Thursday canceled an extension of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, the latest move by the president targeting the form of immigration relief for people coming from countries facing political upheaval and natural disasters.

In June, amid the island's violent domestic turmoil, the Biden administration announced the temporary immigration protection was extended for Haitians until February 2026.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday that it was vacating the extension and the protections would end on Aug. 3.

As I've discussed, for instance, here, the Haitians have been key to an elaborate NGO-driven economy. The Biden immigration policy brought in hundreds of thousands of Haitians, who needed jobs, housing, food, health care, cars, education, and so on. Other arms of the government then gave grants to NGOs, which in turn worked with sweatshop employers, their job recruiters, slumlords, community organizers, and so forth to supplement the migrants' low-pay jobs and overcrowded rentals, which drove down salaries and drove up rents.

The Haitians then strained local schools and health care resources. The NGOs apparently bought them cars, but they didn't get driver training or insurance, and the local insurance rates soared. But for the NGOs, some of which were associated with Catholic Charities, there was a guaranteed skim: part of the grants was always a generous percentage for the NGOs' administrative overhead. DOGE has been restricting these charges to 15%, when they previously had been as high as 70% -- but if the Haitians must go back to Haiti, there will be far less need for such grants going forward in any case.

The complaints from the US Catholic Bishops about cuts to their programs would have more credibility if we knew how much their programs charge for administrative overhead, as well as the precise activities they sponsor in places like Springfield. I have a suspicion that some of these programs have been hijacked by secular employees with a political agenda in conflict with Church teachings, or tacitly tolerated by local bishops with a similar agenda. At minimum, the precise budgets and line item programs need to be made transparent -- the bishops should be eager for these issues to be resolved.

The administrative overhead skim is completely legal. But I've always thought there's also an illegal skim, part of which takes the form of kickbacks to politicians, organizers, and other influential parties. The most prominent in the past week has been the $2 billion awarded to a climate group with ties to former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, described by Wikipedia as "an American politician, lawyer, voting rights activist, author, and perennial candidate", who has not held public office since leaving the Georgia House of Representatives in 2017.

The money was earmarked for Power Forward Communities — a nonprofit partnered with multiple left-wing groups founded by Abrams and which the Georgia Democrat has stated she was “thrilled” to be part of, the Washington Free Beacon reported on Wednesday.

The funds were set aside at an outside financial institution — Citibank — before Biden left office and part of a larger, $20 billion pot of money the former president’s EPA received through the Inflation Reduction Act to dole out to climate groups.

“It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told the outlet, referring to Power Forward Communities’ latest tax filings. “That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”

It's hard to avoid thinking that much of such money simply finds its way into the pockets of favored figures. Cuts in at at least some foreign and domestic NGO progams have been immediater, resulting in layoffs and project terminations. In the USAID,

In the first day President Trump took office in the White House, he paused almost all of the operations of the world’s single biggest aid donor – US Agency for International Development (USAID) – for 90 days.

Prior to Trump’s pause on aid, more than 10,000 people worked for the organisation, with around two-thirds working overseas. Because of the freeze, many have been put on leave and thousands of contractors have lost their jobs. Projects across the world have also been forced to alter or cease operations entirely.

In Ukraine alone,

Shelters used by evacuees are also facing uncertain futures. One location used in Ukraine for evacuees is a concert hall in the eastern part of the country. Prior to the freeze, 60 per cent of the costs to run the shelter (around $7,000 USD) was being paid by the US.

News outlets have also been hit, such as Ukraïner – known for its war reports in many languages – which has announced it is scaling back its operations since the USAID cut. Dozens of its projects rely on financial support from the organisation.

‘We will no longer be able to make the series of war reports…because they are very expensive to produce,’ said Ukraïner’s founder Bohdan Logvynenko in a Facebook post. ‘To make them cheaper and stop traveling to the front line, we may have to significantly sacrifice quality.’

The situation in Ukraine seems to be changing by the hour. As of yesterday, there were sketchy reports that at least some US weapon shipments had been paused:

Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Kostenko, who works as the secretary of the Verkhovna Rada’s Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, told reporters on Thursday that the US weapon sales and deliveries have been halted.

Kostenko made the announcement during a press roundtable on Thursday that was later posted on YouTube.

According to Kostenko, “Deliveries of the weapons that were going to be sold have stopped. Those companies that were supposed to transfer these weapons here are now waiting, because there is no decision.”

But every indication is that Trump's people are working across the board to stop the grift machine by simply turning off the money spigot. This in turn is causing loud complaints, which is useful in itself -- as various administration figures have pointed out, the people complaining the loudest, certainly including those in Congress, are the ones losing the most. That's where we need to look.

Substance From A US Vice President

This is moralistic garbage, which is unfortunately the rhetorical currency of the globalists because they have nothing else to say.

For three years, President Trump and I have made two simple arguments: first, the war wouldn't have started if President Trump was in office;… https://t.co/xH33s6X5yf

— JD Vance (@JDVance) February 20, 2025

When I think about vice presidents, I automatically think about Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, and Joe Biden. Dick Cheney at the time was an exception, but his reputation is steadily declining. Then we're back to Al Gore, Dan Quayle, Bush père, Walter Mondale, and Spiro Agnew. Contrast all these with J D Vance's remarks in the post above about the situation on the ground in Ukraine:

. . . neither Europe, nor the Biden administration, nor the Ukrainians had any pathway to victory. This was true three years ago, it was true two years ago, it was true last year, and it is true today.

. . . President Trump is dealing with reality, which means dealing with facts. And here are some facts:

. . . Number two, Russians have a massive numerical advantage in manpower and weapons in Ukraine, and that advantage will persist regardless of further Western aid packages. Again, the aid is *currently* flowing.

. . . Number five, the conflict has placed--and continues to place--stress on tools of American statecraft, from military stockpiles to sanctions (and so much else). We believe the continued conflict is bad for Russia, bad for Ukraine, and bad for Europe. But most importantly, it is bad for the United States.

Given the above facts, we must pursue peace, and we must pursue it now. President Trump ran on this, he won on this, and he is right about this. It is lazy, ahistorical nonsense to attack as "appeasement" every acknowledgment that America's interest must account for the realities of the conflict.

There's an intriguing context here as well. One of his points in his remarks above is that the Western Europeans "pursue domestic policies (on migration and censorship) that offend the sensibilities of most Americans". This is simply an extension of his Munich address last week:

Vice President JD Vance set off a firestorm in Munich when he chastised European leaders for their hostility toward free speech, their democratic deficit and their poorly conceived immigration policies.

Vance’s shocking words — and the prospects of American disengagement — were so traumatic, they prompted French President Emmanuel Macron to cobble together an emergency summit of European leaders, where the participants promptly agreed on nothing.

. . . After three months in the shadow of the omnipresent President Trump, the Munich conference was Vance’s first opportunity in the spotlight on his own. And he was not about to let it pass with some anodyne word salad. He took the opportunity to make it into a major address on the hot-button political and cultural issues of free speech and immigration.

Here's an op-ed at USA Today:

Watching Harris speak to a crowd or give an interview made me feel humiliation for our country. I'd think, this is our best? This is who we brought to the world stage to represent us?

After listening to Vice President JD Vance defend free speech and blast censorship last week in Europe, I don't feel like that anymore. Vance has brought clarity, inspiration and leadership to the vice presidency, and he took it on the road to show Europeans who America is now and why we hold Western values so dear.

Vance is the kind of vice president Americans deserve.

. . . Have you ever been in a toxic, dysfunctional relationship then met someone healthy and new and thought, "Wow, I didn't realize how bad things were until now?" That is how millions of Americans feel now that Vance is representing the United States here and abroad.

. . . Americans deserve a vice president who is a powerful envoy − an ambassador of our ideas.

On one hand, Vance is something completely new, or almost -- Theodore Roosevelt as vice president under McKinley might be comparable, and McKinley is at least arguably comparable to Trump:

William McKinley (January 29, 1843 – September 14, 1901) was the 25th president of the United States, serving from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. A member of the Republican Party, he led a realignment that made Republicans largely dominant in the industrial states and nationwide for decades. He successfully led the U.S. in the Spanish–American War, overseeing a period of American expansionism, with the annexations of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii. McKinley also rejected inflationary plans such as free silver in favor of keeping the nation on the gold standard, and raised protective tariffs.

But while Roosevelt rose as a reforming politician and active media figure in the years before he became vice president -- and even during the 1900 campaign, when he enthusiastically supported McKinley as his running mate -- according to Wikipedia, he lost interesst in the vice presidency.

The office was a powerless sinecure and did not suit Roosevelt's aggressive temperament. Roosevelt's six months as vice president were uneventful and boring for a man of action. He had no power; he presided over the Senate for a mere four days before it adjourned.

Vance, on the other hand, appears to be playing the office for all it's worth. I'm not sure if we've ever seen anything like this.

Kickbacks?

Trump and Musk have been doing a lot of teasing about the hundreds of billions that are going to the wrong places. but so far. they haven't come out with many specifics. One of his latest targets has been Ukraine:

President Zelenskyy said last week that he doesn’t know where half of the money is that we gave him. We gave them, I believe, US$350 billion, but let’s say it’s something less than that. But it's a lot. . . Where is all the money that’s been given?

I've never seen an accounting of it.

Sundance comments at Conservative Treehouse,

President Trump seems increasingly close to exposing the truth about the Ukraine war and how U.S. politicians are motivated in their influence positions by the financial benefits of the conflict.

Sundance himself has been naming names. Observing the European security meeting in Munich last week, he said,

The U.S. congressional delegation (CODEL) to the Munich Security Conference consists of key Republicans (DeceptiCons) and corrupt Democrats who fund the Ukraine money laundry. A process that includes kick-backs of the proceeds to the bank accounts of the Republicans and Democrats present.

. . . All of these congressional delegation members receive kickbacks as part of their indulgence package, many sit on the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Senators include: Chris Murphy, Roger Wicker, Sheldon Whitehouse, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn, Jeanne Shaheen, Chris Coons, Thom Tillis, Chris Van Hollen, Joni Ernst, Elissa Slotkin, Adam Schiff, and one more I cannot quite make out, possibly Peter Welch.

Every one of these senators are working against the Trump administration, openly or under cover. Every one!

Roger Wicker was Pete Hegseth’s legislative confirmation guide and the republican Senator who went bananas yesterday when Secretary Hegseth said Ukraine would not gain NATO membership. You will easily remember Joni Ernst immediate opposition to Hegseth also.

Sundance refers to remarks by Trump at a February 12 press conference:

President Trump notes the corruption being outlined is of such a massive number, “billions and billions”, that there is no way these payments do not include kickbacks, likely to politicians. Trump then turns to AG Bondi and remarks that this is something the AG will likely have to look at. “There’s a lot of things to look at Pam.”

. . . “Nobody cares” within the system, President Trump remarks. Saying if that attitude permeates long enough the government “loses control” of the payment process. This appears to be the general finding within the DOGE review of various agencies. The “waste, fraud and abuse,” is a feature of the current process, not a flaw. It appears to be purposeful and happening by design of the runaway government created in the aftermath of Obama and Biden.

President Trump notes the judicial challenges to the DOGE review essentially, give the corrupt officials “time to cover their tracks.”

So far, the legacy media has insisted that these claims are without merit. For instance, Forbes wrote,

Musk claimed while taking questions from reporters at the White House on Tuesday that federal employees, including those at USAID, “managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars” while working for the federal government, accusing them of profiting off of taxpayer money. He did not name names, but said “quite a few people,” whom he called “fraudsters,” were receiving “kickbacks.” Musk offered no evidence of who is getting rich or by how much, and he did not elaborate on specific instances of any criminal activity, including fraud.

. . . There’s no evidence to suggest USAID has engaged in money laundering. On Saturday afternoon, Musk reposted a claim on X that suggested USAID was a “form of money laundering tax payers money into far-left organizations,” adding: “Absolutely,” though neither poster offered sources or factual information. Although Republicans have criticized the organization for alleged wasteful spending, there’s no evidence that USAID was engaging in criminal behavior to support left-wing organizations.

Here's why I think there's something behind the tease -- look at the senators who've been falling into line to confirm every one of Trump's cabinet level nominees. Take, for instance.Joni Ernst:

Ernst, as an advocate for women serving in combat roles and for cracking down on sexual assault in the military, was initially viewed as a Republican senator who would be extremely skeptical of Hegseth’s nomination, given his past statements on women in combat.

“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” Hegseth told podcast host Shawn Ryan in early November.

. . . Senate observers thought Ernst, herself a rape survivor, might have a hard time voting for Hegseth after it was revealed that a woman accused him of sexual assault at a Republican women’s convention in Monterrey, Calif., in 2017.

But notice that Ernst appears on Sundance's list of senators he suspects of getting kickbacks from Ukraine at the link above. She may have wanted to assert her independence from the Orange Man, or she might have wanted to get something more in return for a yes vote, but suddenly she was with the program. And Murkowski and Collins were on board as well -- the only exception has been Mitch McConnell, which is not to say he's sinless -- far from it, I'm sure. But he's a sick man, and Trump can get along without him.

This is not the Trump of 2017. He has something on every Republican, and every one of them has been told this.

How Not To Think About History

The problem with Glenn Reynolds and the other contributors to the Instapundit blog is that they're intellectual welterweights at best. Reynolds is a transhumanist who used to talk a lot about Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity, not so muich lately, probably because like the melting of the polar ice, it was supposed to happen but hasn't. He's also a libertarian, which is a different way of saying he's an Ayn Rand cultist. I've never been able to find out if he has a contract to have his head frozen when he dies.

The other day I ran across a link on that site to an odd essay purporting to explain what's happening, “Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century”, which is actually just a link to yet another essay, the sort of thing they love at Instapundit.

The 125 years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of WWI in 1914 was later described as the “Long Nineteenth Century”. The phrase recognized that to speak of “the nineteenth century” was to describe far more than a specific hundred-year span on the calendar; it was to capture the whole spirit of an age: a rapturous epoch of expansion, empire, and Enlightenment, characterized by a triumphalist faith in human reason and progress. That lingering historical spirit, distinct from any before or after, was extinguished in the trenches of the Great War.

So wait a moment. World War I happened because the 19th century went on too long? (I used to get in a lot of trouble in college and grad school for asking questions like this in class.) Eventually I found some contrarian professors who explained that it was a serious error to hypostatize centuries, to treat an abstract entity as if it has real qualities. For example, the 18th century was the Age of Reason. Thus Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was a rationalist, which he definitely was not.

Or David Hume (1711-1776), who said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”. The essay continues,

R.R. Reno opens his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods by quoting a young man who laments that “I am twenty-seven years old and hope to live to see the end of the twentieth century”. His paradoxical statement captures how the twentieth century has also extended well past its official sell-by date in the year 2000.

So Trump happened because the 20th century went on too long, but that was only because the 19th century started early but ran late.

The spirit of the Long Twentieth could not be more different from that which preceded it. In the wake of the horrors inflicted by WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe understandably made “never again” the core of their ideational universe. They collectively resolved that fascism, war, and genocide must never again be allowed to threaten humanity.

But wasn't it a major theme of much literature in or about the inter-war period the disillusionment with the noble cause of the "war to end wars"? What about Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and its epigraph from Gertrude Stein, "You are all a lost generation", or Whittaker Chambers in Witness describing the formative effect his travels in post-Versailles Germany had on him? In fact, there is a whole post-World War II literary school that simply echoes the 1920s cynicism, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

In fact, Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory discusses in detail the effect of the widespread destruction on literary disillusionment, but one of the key literary works he cites as an example is Heller's 1961 Catch-22, set in World War II with an overall Marxist-Leninist subtext. Indeed, the essayist who traces 20th-century thought to "never again" idealism completely neglects Viet Nam-era disillusionment with establishment foreign policy.

On one hand, the historical view that the Zeitgeist must eventually glance at the calendar and update itself, especially if it's getting late, is an absurdity. On the other hand, if the explanation for Trump isn't that the 20th century went on too long, what's a better explanation?

I still have to fall back on the populist writer Ferdinand Lundberg and The Rich and the Super-Rich. His explanation for the state of American society from the post-Civil War period onward is that it had been dominated by an oligarchical class made up largely of the extended families and descendents of the industrial robber barons. They were in a position to control media, dominate intellectual life by endowing foundations, universities, and private schools, control religious institutions like The Episcopal Church, and place themselves or their hirelings at policy government levels in both parties.

There was a strong consensus among this class on the social agenda. It was dominated by the late 19th century paradigm of Fabian socialism, whereby the upper class, driven by fear of the Marxist proletarian revolution, would temporize and co-opt working class demands with gradual but meaningless reforms whose intent was to provide an illusion of progress while keeping the upper class in place. A secondary goal after the civil rights movement was to temporize with the threat of a helter-skelter race war by a program of token concessions to minorities.

It seems to me that the explanation for Trump is the loss of this consensus among the upper class. One factor is the receding fear of a world proletarian revolution due to the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist model by the 1990s. Another is that the expense of both the Cold War style military strategies and Fabian social programs has become unsustainable. The token concessions to minorities have also proven ineffective, while they reduce the morale and productivity of the working class overall.

This reassessment is by no means unanimous, in part because a substantial part of the upper class recognizes that whatever happens to the population at large, they can still pay off whomever needs to be paid off, and within their gated communities and exclusive condos, life will go on. What seems to have occurred, though, is that a new wealthy class has come up with fewer ties to the established foundations, universities, and other institutions. It's new money that comes from another generation of technical innovation that makes the older consensus less relevant.

But the older consensus dates from the 19th century, not the post-World War II period. It seems to me that Trump happened because he was able to form a working majority among the wealthy that would entertain a new paradigm that as yet isn't fully formed.

Captain Steeeve Takes A Video Down

I notice that a popular airline pilot who has a YouTube channel with 309,000 subscribers, Captain Steeeve, was forced to take down a video that covered the September 29 Reagan National collision:

We recently took down a major video that we had put up on the channel, and many of you have noticed that, and I wanted to address that topic. I'm an active pilot for a major aiirline in this country, and I have to be sensitive to those concerns in my life as well, and all of us are aware of the recent events in aviation, they are headline news still to this day, and I just want to let you know at this channel, we're monitoring those events.

But that one video in particular I was asked to take down, and I gladly took it down. Now, over the years I taught a course in the Navy on leadership, and one of the lessons I taught in that course was, never forget about the"whos" behind the "whats". Now, what does that mean? That means that there are people and relationships and things associated with the "whats", the tasks, the things in our lives. A video on a YouTube channel is just that. It's a thing. It's something that you can post, it's something that you can take down, it's something that you can look at, it's something that you can view, but at the end of the day, it's nothing more than a thing.

There are alwaqys "whos" associated with the "whats" or the things in our lives, and the "whos" are much more important, so shortly after that video was posted, many of you watched it, I was approached and asked to take the video down out of concern for the "whos", and you know what, it was easy for me to say yes to that, because I will always, will always care about the "whos" more than the "whats", and so now you know.

He's said in almost as many words that some powerful people, some "whos", saw his video, a "what", didn't like it, and were in a position to threaten his job if he didn't take it down. Since he liked his job, and the video was just a "what", he took the video down. It sounds to me as though the "whos" talked to another "who" at his airline, and the airline "who" gave the ultimatum. As they say,

From the pilot’s perspective, the chief pilot at a big airline is like the school’s principal.

If you can go your whole career without the chief knowing your name, you’re probably doing something right.

Pilots usually only get face time with the chief if something goes wrong and they’re in big trouble!

It sounds very much to me as if the chief pilot spoke with Captain Steve. I saw the video at the time, and oddly enough, someone copied it, and it's still out there. A Facebook user has another copy. As they say, the internet is forever. Here it is:

The key item that seems to have the "whos" all riled up is at 2:10:

This is not the final word on it, but what I think happened was, it was at night, there's several airplanes lined up, there is that Blue Streak 5342, which is the CRJ that they ran into, right behind them just a few miles is American 3130. Everybody has their lights on as they're coming in, I believe the helicopter looked at the American 3130 and said, "I've got the traffic in sight", and they never saw the CRJ, the airplane that was right next to them. That's my conjecture on what happens.

If you think about it, this is pretty mild stuff to start with -- all he's saying is the helo crew made a pretty understandable miatake, and he isn't singling anyone out or directly blaming anyone. Beyond that, he's on perfectly solid legal ground, he's made it clear this isn't the final word, this is his conjecture. But even beyond that, nobody in the helo has standing to sue for defamation, because they're all dead:

Under common law and according to the definition of this defamation, deceased individuals cannot be defamed. Defamation is defined as an act or statement that damages one’s reputation. The dead do not have reputations to damage. The memory of a deceased person can be damaged, but this is not addressed under the tort of defamation.

But there's another puzzle here. I linked to Juan Browne's February 3 video update on the collision in this post. That video is still up, but it's far more directly critical of the helicopter crew. As I quoted in that post, Browne said,

So just within some 16 or so seconds of the collision, once again, PAT25 confirms that he still has the CRJ in sight. requesting visual separation. They're just saying this automatically, "request visual separation have him in sight", as if it's a normalization of deviance, it's like this is the way they've been doing it all the time, and he's convinced that he's got tthe correct aircraft in sight, when in fact he does not.

What he's saying isn't much different from what Captain Steve said, the helo didn't actually see the CRJ, but he characterizes it as "normalization of deviance", much harsher than anything Captain Steve said. But apparently Juan Browne's chief pilot hasn't been on his case, even two weeks after that video. Why not?

• Maybe the Lobach family couldn't discover which airline Browne flies for. Unlikely.
• Maybe Browne's chief pilot has Browne's back, unlike Captain Steve's. Credible, but I'm not sure.
• Maybe Browne answered you can't defame the dead, and threatened to countersue the Lobachs for tortious interference. Well, maybe. That's what I'd do, but that's just me.
• Maybe Browne's chief pilot told him he can keep the video up, but don't post about the collision again. Probably this is most likely.

On one hand, the reality for the Lobachs is that the collision and Rebecca's role in it is so much in the news that trying to stifle commentary is going to be like King Cnut trying to sweep back the tide. They couldn't even get copies of Captain Steve's video taken down, even if they got him to delete the original. Beyond that, other videos like the one I linked in yestrerday's post, are even harsher than Juan Browne or Captain Steve -- that one yesterday says it's doubtful the NTSB can be trusted to make an unbiased report.

This is probably a correct assessment, given the Lobach family is apparently able to find out who certain YouTubers work for, talk to their employers, get the employers to listen, and threaten their jobs. They are probably as aware as anyone that they can't threaten everyone. For instance, I'm retired, and even if they threatened to go after my pension or my bank, I'd simply have my attorney explain to their attorney about tortious interference.

But that's me. A lot of oher people will just get the mesaage to keep quiet, and that's what the Lobachs want. Nevertheless, I do get the feeling the Lobachs took Captain Steeve as a good first target pour encourager les autres -- he seems like a nebbish to me.