So, What Is Trump Up To In Venezuela?

The YouTube embedded above is one of very few attempts I've found anywhere to parse out what Trump's objectives are now in Venezuela. In it, Preston Stewart is a West Point graduate and Afghan combat veteran who posts about veterans' affairs on TikTok and YouTube, as well as on various podcasts. In this episode, he interviews Juan Gonzalez, whom he identifies as a former National Security Council Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere and currently a resident fellow at the Georgetown Americas Institute.

Under the principle of "trust but verity". I note that Mr Stewart has inflated Mr Gonzalez's title from "Director", as it appears on this link, to "Senior Director". He omits that Gonzalez was also "Special Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden from 2013-2015, where he advised and represented the Vice President on all policy matters related to the Western Hemisphere". Gonzalez was also Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department in 2016.

However, apparently after Trump's 2016 election, he moved to the Penn Biden Centerr for Global Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which appears to have been a holding tank for Biden loyalists while Joe was out of office. But he doesn't seem to have returned to either the White House or the State Department following Biden's 2020 election. He is currently listed as a fellow at the Georgetown Americas Institute on its website.

One thing that puzzles me is Gonzalez speaks on the screen with what appears to be his desk behind him, but on the desktop and shelves are a few books, a fair amount of bric-a-brac, and a lot of family photos -- but there's neither a computer screen nor a keyboard in sight. Hey, this is 2025 -- if you work at any sort of professional job, you work with a computer. What does this guy actually do for a living, and why does he have so much time to schmooze with a YouTuber? In fact, if he actually worked on real issues connected with Venezuela and the drug trade, wouldn't he actually need high-level approval to speak publicly on sensitive material? Just wondering. I'm not impresssed with this interview overall, but it sent me looking for other answers.

I give him credit for being up front; he clearly worked for both Obama and Biden, and he says he disagrees with almost everything Trump is doing over Venezuela --- but revealingly, he basically says nothing Obama tried to do with Chavez or Maduro worked. And in the end, he has little productive to say, other than to minimize the role of cocaine smuggling in tbhe whole Venezuela question, which is nevertheless the issue Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth have all stressed in their public remarks. He also says that it's unrealistic to expect a Venezuelan military coup against Maduro, because all the generals are carefully screened fior loyalty.

But this brought me up against remarks by another well-placed policy commentator who's begun to appear on YouTube with some frequency, Sarah Paine, a professor at the US Naval War College. She frequently mentions the disadvantages of large standing armies, as she does in this interview: they generate coups, and they need to be paid. As she puts it, they "tended to influence political institutions in authoritarian directions". Indeed, she often makes the point that in China, the Peoples Liberation Army controls the economy to benefit itself.

But this brought me to another thought: I noted back in February that Trump's strategy to stop the grift machine is to turn off the money spigot. If NGOs are feeding mass migration via settlement programs, end the federal grants that finance the NGOs. If universities are treating foreign students as a cash cow, which in turn fosters anti-Semitism, end federal grants to universities, and cut off their foreign students.

So I immediately began to wonder if Trump saw the threat of military force against Venezuelan gofast boats as a way to turn off the money spigot, and I applied Sarah Paine's insights into military rule to the question: yes, the military is in charge, but the military wants to get paid. A few moments searching the web brought up some productive insights (this may give some context to why Juan Gonzalez doesn't have a keyboard or a screen on his desk). For instance:

Venezuela was historically among the wealthiest economies in South America, particularly from the 1950s to 1980s. During the 21st century, under the leadership of socialist populist Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan economy has collapsed, prompting millions of citizens to flee Venezuela. GDP has fallen by 80 percent in less than a decade. The economy is characterized by corruption, food shortages, unemployment, mismanagement of the oil sector, and since 2014, hyperinflation.

So, given Venezuela's economic collapse, how is the military getting paid? Remember, Sarah Paine's point is that the military controls the economy to advantage itself.

Venezuela has been a path to the United States for cocaine originating in Colombia, through Central America and Mexico and Caribbean countries such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. In the 2010s, Venezuela also gradually became a major producer of cocaine.

. . . In 2005 Venezuela severed ties with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), accusing its representatives of spying. Following the departure of the DEA from Venezuela and the expansion of DEA's partnership with Colombia in 2005, Venezuela became more attractive to drug traffickers.

. . . Since 2012, the United States government has stated that "generally permissive security forces and a corrupt political environment have made Venezuela one of the preferred routes of cocaine trafficking from South America". . . . According to the United States, "elements of the Venezuelan security forces have assisted these drug trafficking organizations".

In other words, the military is getting paid, either directly via transporting the drugs themselves, or via payoffs from the cartels, from the drug trade, since the legitimate Venezualan economy has collapsed.

Earlier this year, I noted that business-school studies of Trump's negotiating strategy point out that he carefully studies both his opponents' strong and weak points. The Venezuelans' weak points are first, that their economy is forced to rely on drug trafficking, but also, that the drug routes involve long stretches over international waters. As Secretary Rubio pointed out in his Mexico City news conference, conventional interdiction via sea-based resources amounts to little more than an overhead item for the traffickers.

On the other hand, tracking of gofast boats via electronic intelligence and drones, and immediate obliteraion of the boats via missiles, threaten something much closer to complete closure of the smuggling routes -- and if the gofast boats can't get through, this turns off the money spigot, and the military doesn't get paid.

What happens next is an open question, although in Wittgenstein's sense, the solution to the problem appears in the disappearance of the problem. Juan Gonzalez complains that only a third of US cocaine imports come via the Caribbean, but that's a third of US cocaine imports, a major dent -- and done via drones and missiles, a fairly cheap solution. Questions of coups, regime change, or boots on the ground are irrelevant. The increased US military resources are there simply to protect the drones and anti-boat missiles.

But it also serves as a template. Venezuela isn't the only country where the cartels control the state via the military. It's a template for strategy elsewhere: find a way for drones and missiles to stop the drug trade outside the borders, and other things will inevitably follow.

Blowing Up The Drug Boat

Dutch Caribbean Coastguard is a fun program on the National Geographic channel that for whatever reason lacks the tendentiousness of most material there. Curaçao, Aruba and St Maarten are part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and their waters are patrolled by the Dutch Coast Guard, which works closely with the US Coast Guard, US Navy, and US Marines.

The islands are due north of Venezuela, so a big part of the job for all the agencies is to monitor drug trafficking and illegal immigration from that country. Pretty much every episode of the show has scenes of Dutch patrol aircraft tracking "gofast boats" carrying cocaine from Venezuela, which whenever possible are referred to Dutch or US surface vessels for interdiction. To those who watch the National Geographic show, gofast boats and interdictions are nothing new, and it gives context to Secretary Rubio's remarks in Mexico City:

The deadly US military strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean Tuesday marked a significant and escalatory shift in the Trump administration’s fight against drug trafficking, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio signaled there would be more destruction moving forward.

Rubio on Wednesday argued that the traditional policy of intercepting drug-carrying vessels had not worked. Instead, the US is “going to wage war on narco-terrorist organizations.”

“The United States has long, for many, many years, established intelligence that allow us to interdict and stop drug boats. We did that. And it doesn’t work,” Rubio said at a press conference in Mexico City.

“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them,” he said, arguing that interdiction doesn’t work because drug cartels plan to lose 2% of their cargo.

According to this site,

Very few details have been released so far. A senior U.S. defense official described the action as a “precision strike,” but provided no details on the platform used to deliver the attack, the type of weapons employed, or the nature of the cargo on board.

The timeline of the events that led to the strike is also missing. As of now, what can be said with enough certainty is that strike happened within the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) area of responsibility, in the southern Caribbean, and the weapon involved could be an AGM-114 Hellfire missile.

. . . The choice to destroy the vessel outright, rather than seize it and apprehend its crew, stands out as an unusual tactic in U.S. counter-narcotics operations. Traditionally, the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy interdict suspicious vessels, confiscating drugs and arresting suspects. Analysts noted that the strike more closely resembled counterterrorism operations against militant groups.

Julio Ricardo Varela writes on MSNBC:

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump said the U.S. military blew up a vessel in the Caribbean, killing 11 people. The administration said the boat had departed from Venezuela and described the operation as a narco-trafficking bust against Tren de Aragua gang members. To anyone who knows the tragic history of U.S. interventionism in Latin America, it was an act of war.

. . . This week’s strike was an act of war. To pretend otherwise is to ignore history and to blind ourselves to what the United States has done time and again in Latin America and the Caribbean. If we are serious about learning from the past, we should call it what it is.

The Maduro regime for now seems to want to play chicken:

Two Venezuelan military aircraft flew dangerously close to a U.S. Navy destroyer in international waters on Thursday, a move the Pentagon denounced as a deliberate attempt to disrupt American counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean.

“Today, two Maduro regime military aircraft flew near a U.S. Navy vessel in international waters. This highly provocative move was designed to interfere with our counter-narco-terror operations,” the Defense Department said late Thursday in a statement on its X account. “The cartel running Venezuela is strongly advised not to pursue any further effort to obstruct, deter, or interfere with counter-narcotics and counter-terror operations carried out by the U.S. military.”

The best parallel case I can see is Manuel Noriega in Panama:

[In 1987] the United States cut off aid to Panama and tried to get Noriega to resign; in 1988, the U.S. began considering the use of military action to put an end to his drug trafficking. Noriega voided the May 1989 presidential election, which included a U.S.-backed candidate, and in December of that year he declared his country to be in a state of war with the United States. Shortly afterward, an American marine was killed by Panamanian soldiers. President George H.W. Bush authorized “Operation Just Cause,” and on December 20, 1989, 13,000 U.S. troops were sent to occupy Panama City, along with the 12,000 already there, and seize Noriega.

The following January 3, he surrendered to US troops to face charges of drug trafficking. He was flown to Miami for trial. On July 10, 1992, he was convicted of drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

The US is currently alleging that Maduro is running Venezuela as a narco-tafficking state, and it's certainly possible to envision a similar chain of events, especially if Venezuela does anything provocative against US forces.

For now, it's easy enough to see that gofast boats have only one purpose, to outrun Dutch and US drug enforcement assets in the South Caribbean. They are neither pleasure boats nor fishing vessels. US statements strongly imply that drug trafficking activity at the level it has been taking place can only be done with the active collaboration of the Venezuelan government. It appears that the US is working to develop a comperehensive legal basis for direct military action against Maduro, and its policies will continue in this direction.

What's Maduro going to do, declare war? Noriega already tried that.

The Epstein Victims' Press Conference

Via The Postmillennial:

Outside the Capitol building on Wednesday, Reps Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna held a press conference regarding their Epstein Files Transparency Act they introduced to Congress in July. During the press conference, women who identified themselves as victims of infamous financier Jeffrey Epstein spoke out. One of the women said that survivors of Epstein would be compiling their own list of people who frequented Epstein's world.

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse adds an important qualifier:

Most of the various victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation have previously been paid victim compensation amid various lawsuits including a substantial $290 million financial settlement from JPMorgan Bank in 2023, one of the financial institutions used by Epstein. These lawsuits resulted in what has been reported as ‘various non-disclosure agreements’ (NDAs), which the victims signed.

After the DOJ and congress has released all of the available files, and with various courts refusing to break the seals on names and files within grand jury records, and against the background of multiple victims receiving considerable previous compensation, a group of Epstein victims held a press conference in Washington, DC today demanding the sealed names and NDA covered names be released.

The victims would not, most likely because they legally cannot, discuss the names; but they did say they would compile another private list of names of the people to whom they were trafficked. What the purpose of that private list would be is unknown. The entire thing now seems really weird.

This seems to be the problem with this whole production -- lots of maybe-sorta-kinda, but nothing new and nothing concrete. For instance,

A Jeffrey Epstein survivor recalled a trip to Africa with former President Bill Clinton and how the convicted sex trafficker often bragged about his relationship with President Donald Trump during an emotional statement on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

Chauntae Davies, speaking during a press conference with other victims, said her nightmare with Epstein began in 2002, when she was introduced to Ghislaine Maxwell while living in Los Angeles.

. . . At one point, she accompanied Epstein on a trip to Africa with Clinton and “other notable figures.” She said she quickly realized how “powerless” she was as a young woman in the throes of Epstein’s orbit and his connections to powerful American figures and world leaders.

But this story is at least five years old, and it relates to a photo of Davies, at the time a 22-year-old working as a flight attendant on Epstein's plane, giving Clinton a shoulder massage, both fully clothed. It quotes a Daily Mail article that carried the photo in 2020:

Davies acted as an air stewardess on the flight and described being shocked when Clinton boarded the plane, saying he was "charming and sweet".

Davies, now in her early 40s, said of the massage pictures: "Although the image looks bizarre, President Clinton was a perfect gentleman during the trip and I saw absolutely no foul play involving him."

So if you scratch past the glitzy teases, this turns out to be old stuff, and there's nothing there. A number of the women who appeared at the press conference seem to be professional "Epstein survivors", like Lisa Phillips. From the Postmillennial link:

Lisa Phillips said she was taken to Epstein's island in 2000 while she had been on a nearby island for a photoshoot and said "what I experienced there was a glimpse into a very dark and disturbing world." She said that survivors would be compiling their own list.

She has her own website, where she promotes herself as an advocate for survivors of abuse in the modeling industry, but she makes very little specific reference to any direct abuse she may have had from Epstein or his associates. Again, there's nothing new here, and the context of the statements made at the press conference suggests that the speakers there have already been compensated and are legally constrained from making any other revelations. Sundance's conclusion:

The Occam’s Razor review of the current state of Epstein victims’ status, is one that points toward extortion. The victims having previously signed agreements, would be at legal risk to violate their various NDAs. However, for the purposes of structuring a political narrative, there are likely revenue sources willing to fund an ongoing victim narrative.

I suspect the lawyers representing the victims in the video (press conference) are likely compensated by the same entities who fund large domestic political operations. The “Republicans” who align with the intention of the efforts, seem to hold a commonality with the same financial interests behind former Republican candidate Ron DeSantis.

An even simpler explanation is pure narcissism: the ladies are now in their 40s and fading; here's one more chance to get in front of cameras. Rep Massie is pretty clearly a grandstander and is likely being manipulated by Rep Khanna. I wouldn't place many bets on his continuing political career.

But beyond that, there's that last, vain hope that somehow, some way, someone might come forward and tie Trump to Epstein once and for all. Short of a sudden medical emergency, which everyone seems to have been hoping for last week, that seems to be the one remaining possibility to end the whole nightmare.

Lisa Cook And The Grievance Elite

I said last week that more would inevitably come out about Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve board member whom Trump fired for alleged mortgage fraud. And in fact, more has. But I keep thinking about remarks by Shelby Steele, who invented the term "grievance elite" to describe the highly prestigious post-civil rights era African-American leadership and examine the conditions that created them. In a 1999 presentation The New Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, he said:

If we go back to the 1960s and the civil rights era, and so forth, there was this, I think, interesting moment, when America on the one hand did something extremely honorable, which was to say, “We are wrong as a society in the way we have treated black Americans. It is immoral what we did.” Almost no other society that I know of on Earth has yet done that other than America.

. . . What happens when you say you were wrong is that you lose moral authority. You just don’t have it any more. It is the price you pay.

. . . the real story of our racial policy in America grows out of this white difficulty. And that most of our policies since the sixties have really been devoted to sort of restoring that moral authority, or trying to reclaim that moral authority. In some cases it is almost comic, it is almost hysterical.

. . . We are trying to prove that we are good—that we are a really good, decent people, and so we’ll give you welfare generation after generation after generation, even though it may be tearing you apart. Welfare has probably done a great deal more damage to the black American family than segregation ever did. But it was a policy based on the principles of deference and license.

Affirmative action, again, is another sort of example. There are many, many varieties of affirmative action that we all know, but at the same two principles are ever present: defer to the suffering and victimization of blacks and then offer them license, that is, lower the standards; ask less, not more.

Everything we're coming to learn about Lisa Cook is that she's been a mediocritry all her life who's nevertheless displayed an astonishing attitude of entitlement. This post on X by investigative reporter Chris Brunet details the saga of her tenure application at Michigan State in 2013:

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: I obtained Lisa Cook’s 85-page Tenure Packet via FOIA. Download link below.

It’s heavily redacted, but here are the big takeaways:

1) Michigan State’s econ dept likely voted against tenure — but were overruled by the Dean. This means she was not even good enough… pic.twitter.com/m9vlRSvLIY

— Chris Brunet (@chrisbrunet) September 1, 2025

The post continues,

2) She got tenure despite her research record, not because of it. The tenure packet emphasizes her teaching ability and downplays her research.

3) She would not have gotten tenure without her now-debunked paper.

4) Her tenure packet lists her AER P&P as an AER, with an asterisk indicating it is peer-reviewed. She is lying about this paper being peer reviewed.

5) Every letter writer recognized her as an econ historian, not a macroeconomist or an international economist, which she self-proclaimed to be in Senate testimony.

One thing that strikes me as remarkable is that Cook, who was born in 1964, would have been 49 in 2013, when she became eligible for tenure. Let's consider that talented PhDs complete their dissertations and enter the tenure-track job market sometime in their late 20s. They typically spend six years in probationary assistant professor roles until they reach the up-or-out promotion threshold to associate professor with tenure, which conveys some level of protection against layoff or termination without cause. (If you aren't promoted, though, you have to leave.)

In other words, an ordinary tenure-track faculty member is going to be up for promotion by about 35. Cook took another 14 years to reach this level -- that in itself says something. But what it also says is that someone, or most likely more than one, was in an extremely powerful position to intervene on her behalf. It wasn't just the dean -- someone had to call someone else, who then called the dean, or maybe it was more than one who called the dean. The dean just did what he was told.

But let's go beyond the basic story of her alleged mortgage fraud and ask how she was able successfully to apply for three primary-residence mortgages within a period of months in 2022, when comments on social media say a normal application wouldn't get past the lenders under those circumstances:

Cook likely could not have tricked the underwriting systems at major banks, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, but was approved for two first mortgages from Bank-Fund Staff Federal Credit Union (“BFSFCU”), where she was somehow admitted by BFSFCU as a member even though she has no known affinity to meet eligibility.

Cook made false statements on two mortgage applications that BFSFCU overlooked and closed the two mortgages as primary or secondary residences in Atlanta, GA, and Cambridge, MA, when instead the loans should have been properly disclosed as riskier, higher down payment, and higher rate and fee rental properties.

Cook already had a primary residence and a first mortgage prior to being let into BFSFCU.

. . . Bank-Fund Staff Federal Credit Union in Washington, D.C., is a community – and employer-based membership credit union with $6.5 billion in assets and over 100,000 members.

Eligible members are employees and families of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, with one exception: membership is open to citizens from terrorist countries on the U.S. Treasury list of sanctioned enemies of America.

How is she eligible for BFSFCU, and why did she slide into their DC offices?

Cook is not an employee of the World Bank or the IMF.

. . . Is BFSFCU violating laws that limit credit union membership to “well-defined local communities” in the Credit Union Membership Access Act that require “interaction and/or shared common interests”?

. . . BFSFCU states it has over 100,000 members, yet the number of employees is approximately 13,000 at World Bank and under 4,000 at the IMF.

We're slowly learning from the cases of Cook, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff that the ability to take out primary-residence mortgages on multiple properties is a corner-cutting measure that's available to certain Democrat insiders. Exactly how such insiders become aware of this has yet to be determined, but it seems to require the indirect approval of powerful patrons, people with the ability to bypass ordinary institutional controls.

Someone was able to place a few calls on Cook's behalf and get the Michigan State dean to override the Economics deparment's decision not to grant Cook tenure. Someone, almost certainly not the same person but with equivalent implicit power, was able to steer Cook to the BFSF Credit Union, even though she wasn't an eligible member, and get them to approve two primary-residence mortgages for different properties, when she already had a third on a different property.

But there's an entirely different question: someone had put Cook on the short list for the Federal Reserve by 2022, clearly someone who could talk to James Clyburn, or maybe someone who could talk to someone who could talk to James Clyburn, who could talk to someone close to Biden and get her Fed nomination set in stone. At that point, the shakers and movers could be certain enough of the outcome to green-light the whole mortgage frammis, which had to have been facilitated by the sure and certain knowledge that she'd be confirmed by the Senate to the Fed board. This was all wired in over a period of months prior even to her nomination.

Who are these people? I'm not sure if we'll ever find out, although I assume that based on the criminal referrals, the Justice Department is following up on these leads. Whatever happens, this is the price we pay for the conditions Shelby Steele outlines: defer to the suffering and victimization of blacks and then offer them license, that is, lower the standards; ask less, not more. Cearly there's an elite that's able both to benefit from this policy and enforce it.

Abbe Lowell Is Busy!

Last Wenesday, Trump fired Centers for Desease Control Director Susan Monarez. The conventional wisdom goes like this:

Monarez had refused to go along with the anti-vaccine madness of Trump’s “health czar,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK). Trump had named Monarez as CDC director just a month ago. At her Senate confirmation hearing, Monarez said that “vaccines save lives” and that their use should continue to be supported. If Trump and RFK thought they could just strong-arm Monarez to go along with their anti-vaccine crusade, they were proven wrong.

Monarez had much to say:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention leadership was in stunning disarray Wednesday evening after the Trump administration fired the agency’s director hours after she refused to resign under pressure.

The director, Susan Monarez, said she was resisting being ousted by the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for political reasons after about a month in office.

“When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda. For that, she has been targeted,” said her lawyers, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell.

Abbe Lowell is best known recently for his role as lead counsel for Hunter Biden in two criminal cases on federal gun and tax evasion charges. Hunter was convicted of the gun charges and pleaded guilty to the tax changes; only a last-minute pardon from Joe kept him out of prison. Since then, he's founded hs own law firm that specializes in representing clients who've gotten themselves crosswise with Trump; he's taken on Letitia James and Lisa Cook, and he's now also representing Susan Monarez. Her firing

sparked a near-immediate leadership exodus from the CDC, which is charged with safekeeping the public health of the more than 300 million people in the United States.

At least four top officials announced their resignations, including Dr. Debra Houry, the chief medical officer; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Dr. Jen Layden, director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology.

On one hand, this seems to be a direct outcome of the whole COVID debacle. The day Director Monarez was fired, Secretary Kennedy posted this on X:

I promised 4 things:

1. to end covid vaccine mandates.

2. to keep vaccines available to people who want them, especially the vulnerable.

3. to demand placebo-controlled trials from companies.

4. to end the emergency.

In a series of FDA actions today we accomplished…

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) August 27, 2025

The core objection appears to be this:

The federal government has removed COVID-19 vaccines from the list of shots recommended for healthy pregnant women and children, federal health officials announced Tuesday [May 27}.

"I couldn't be more pleased to announce that as of today the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule," Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a video posted on X. "We're now one step closer to realizing President Trump's promise to make America healthy again."

The decision will make it much harder for parents to get their children vaccinated and for pregnant people to get the shots because insurance companies will likely no longer pay for them.

"Last year the Biden administration urged healthy children to get yet another COVID shot despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children," Kennedy said.

So far, Trump appears to be backing up Kennedy:

President Donald Trump on Monday appeared to raise fresh questions about the Covid-19 vaccines that were first developed on his watch, saying his top public health agency is being “ripped apart” by debate over the success of the shots.

. . . The post represented Trump’s first public comments about the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since the agency’s former director, Dr. Susan Monarez, was abruptly fired on Wednesday, less than a month into her tenure amid a dispute over vaccine policy.

. . . Trump’s comments came after the US Food and Drug Administration announced that it would narrow its approval for the next Covid vaccine, a move that prompted criticism from public health experts and widespread confusion over who will be eligible to receive the shot.

On Monday, commissioner Marty Makary defended the decision in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, arguing that drug makers haven’t justified the need for people who are under 65 or who don’t have certain health conditions to get the vaccine.

“No one knows how many shots a healthy person should get in his natural life,” Makary wrote. “The FDA’s new framework preserves vaccines for those who might most plausibly benefit, while generating evidence for most Americans, who are voting with their feet (or their upper arms) against an eternal annual booster campaign.”

The decisions to limit approval for future COVID boosters reflects a belated recognition that the CDC's handling of COVID and its endorsement of lockdowns seriously damaged its credibility and indeed, the credibility of vaccines overall. Just why, aftrer all, did Biden see the need to give Dr Fauci a blanket pardon with much of his own family?

In the final minutes of his presidency, Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned several family members, including his brothers James and Frank Biden, and sister Valerie Biden Owens.

Biden said the pardons were intended to shield his family from politically motivated attacks and should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment of any wrongdoing.

The eleventh-hour move follows another set of pardons issued to Covid response chief Anthony Fauci and members of the House 6 January riot investigation to prevent what he called "unjustified... politically motivated prosecutions".

There's a great deal we have yet to learn.

More On The Alliance Between The Ultra-Wealthy And Marx's Lumpenproletariat

I can't ask for a better illustration of my thesis on the problem that's beset US inner cities since the 1960s than Trump's latest chioice of opponents:

President Donald Trump on Saturday took aim at Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) on Truth Social, citing Chicago’s violent crime numbers and vowing that federal support could be on the way.

“Six people were killed, and 24 people were shot, in Chicago last weekend, and JB Pritzker, the weak and pathetic Governor of Illinois, just said that he doesn’t need help in preventing CRIME. He is CRAZY!!! He better straighten it out, FAST, or we’re coming! MAGA. President DJT,” Trump wrote.

I asked the web, "What is the Pritzker family's net worth?" and "AI" replied,

The total net worth of the Pritzker family is not a single reported figure, but rather a collection of individual fortunes held by numerous family members, with individual net worths often in the billions. For example, in May 2025, Governor JB Pritzker had an estimated net worth of $3.7 billion, while his sister Penny Pritzker had an estimated net worth of $3.9 billion. The Pritzker fortune is a vast inheritance from the family's founder and the Hyatt Hotels empire.

Ferdinand Lundberg (1902-1995) is so far the most prominent theoretician of concentrated family wealth in US society, but his 1968 The Rich and the Super-Rich doesn't mention the Pritzkers at all. The best-known Pritzker enterprise, Hyatt Hotels, got its start in the late 1950s and grew with the expansion of air travel in the following decade. Thus the Pritzkers had only begun their rise to visibility by the time Lundberg wrote his best-known book.

Accordimg to Wikipedia,

The Pritzker family is an American family engaged in various business enterprises and philanthropy, and one of the wealthiest families in the United States (staying in the top 10 of Forbes magazine's "America's Richest Families" list since the magazine began such listings in 1982). Its fortune started in the 20th century, particularly through the expansion of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation by Jay Pritzker.

In 1995, Jay Pritzker stepped down and Thomas Pritzker took control of The Pritzker Organization. When Jay died in 1999, the family split the business into 11 pieces worth $1.4 billion each (choosing to settle a lawsuit from two family members, who apparently received $500 million each in 2005). By 2011, the dissolution had been completed and the cousins had gone their separate ways, with some pursuing business and others philanthropic or artistic ventures.

The father of both Illinois Gov JB Pritzker and his sister Penny, who is effectively chairman of the Harvard board, is Donald Pritzker (1932–1972), who was co-founder of Hyatt and one of Jay Pritzker's children. Whatever their nominal business and philanthropic titles, they are effectively third-generation rentiers of the Pritzker fortune, among their many siblings and cousins.

While the family is too recent to have figured in Lundberg's overall picture of US wealth, it clearly functions in a role very similar to the role the Rockefellers played in the mid-20th century, with John D Sr's grandsons John D III, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David serving as three state governors, running Chase Bank, and involved in numerous Ivy League and other charitable endowments.

But the Rockefellers themselves were apparently too busy to concern themselves with the problems in the cities, which arose in the 1960s. Tom Wolfe mentions the Roockefellers only four times in Radical Chic, but only to characterize them as "old money" or "old Society", not the sort of people who'd hobnob with Black Panthers. It's a different set who'd build the alliance with Marx's Lumpenproletariat:

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category.

If Marx and Engels had the insight to recognize criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes as a separate class, distinguished in interests from the proletariat, we see a very similar set of class interests in the US inner cities today, street thugs, homeless, illegals, drug traffickers, addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. They tend to control public spaces in ever-expanding areas surrounding the inner cities, but the legitimate residents in the same areas tend to be either their direct victims, or the quality of their daily lives is severly diminished by their presence. These solid citizens are part of the current proletariat.

In the context of the Pritzkers and conditions in (but not limited, even in Illinois, to Chicago), their ally Mayor Brandon Johnson seems oblivious to this distinction:

On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Briefing,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson stated that the Trump administration is focusing on Chicago for immigration enforcement and crime “because there’s clearly a disdain for working people.” And the actions aren’t about crime, but the Trump administration is “working to, not only divide communities, but conquer them.”

What Johnson seems dimly to perceive is that in Washington, DC, the working class has suddenly recognized that a crackdown on street crime, homelessness, and illegals is in their interests -- which he sees as divisive. Polls both nationally and within the District show increasing popularity for Trump's approach:

"Fifty-four percent approve of the president’s approach, using the National Guard in D.C.," [pollster Mark] Penn explained. "That's interesting. Any time I apply the word 'Trump,' it’s very hard to get above 50%. If I take his name off the policies, I get 60, 70, 75, even 80% support—for example, locking up criminals who are here illegally. But when you put his name, the country is so polarized that Democrats won’t concede a single inch."

"So when he gets 54% approving, I think, wow, that’s like a normal 65%. That means there are people who approve of it, but won't say they do if you put the name Trump in the questionnaire."

What this says is that Trump recognizes a basic issue, that the class interests of the Lumpenproletariat are separate from and opposed to the interests of the proletariat. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, new generations of the very wealthy have aligned themselvew with the interests of the Lumpenproletariat, leading to tolerance of street crime, drugs, and homelessnes in the inner cities, under the false pretense that they're looking out for the interests of the proletariat, which are completely separate.

Trump has been extraordinarily perceptive in choosing his opponents. DC Mayor Bowser has deftly managed to avoid being caught in Trump's crosshairs and has reluctantly acknowledged the success of Trump's crackdown. Meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Johnson and Illinois Gov Pritzker are presenting a united front of opposition. The Pritzkers in particular are unattractive and out of touch, defending Harvard and street crime, just the sort of opponents Trump wants -- and his strategy is starting to look like a winner.

Abbe Lowell Pounds The Table

How did Cook afford to take out three mortgages in a matter of a few months? Most lenders would throw a big red flag at this in general—raises more questions: https://t.co/N4E8F4N9qd

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) August 29, 2025

On Thurssay, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte issued a second criminal referral to the Justice Department for Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook:

As Director of the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency," Pulte wrote in an Aug. 28 letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Special Attorney Edward Martin, "I reiterate the referral on August 15, 2025, and provide new information concerning a 3rd property for Lisa D. Cook ('Cook') and what appears to be multiple false representations to the United States Government by Cook while she was a Governor of the Federal Reserve."

In response, Cook's attorney Abbe Lowell said,

This is an obvious smear campaign aimed at discrediting Gov. Cook by a political operative who has taken to social media more than 30 times in the last two days and demanded her removal before any review of the facts or evidence," the attorney asserted in the statement. "Nothing in these vague, unsubstantiated allegations has any relevance to Gov Cook’s role at the Federal Reserve, and they in no way justify her removal from the Board.

As the saying goes, If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table. Abbe Lowell is pounding the table. That he would say nothing in the allegations has any relevance to Cook's role at the Federal Reserve is a little like David Hume's claim that if someone throws a brick at a window, it has no relevance to the fact that a brick broke the window.

There's a problem that won't go away in Cook's mortgage applications, notwitstanding they were made roughly a year before she was formally confirmed. According to Reuters,

Cook's annual financial disclosure, filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, shows one mortgage for an investment property and two mortgages for personal residences. All were dated 2021, when the Georgia native was a professor at Michigan State University and before her May 2022 confirmation by the Senate to the Fed Board of Governors.

. . . A public records search identified a $203,000 mortgage in Cook's name in Washtenaw County, Michigan, dated June 18, 2021, and a $540,000 mortgage, also in her name, in Fulton County, Georgia, dated July 2, 2021. The mortgages were originated by the University of Michigan Credit Union for the Michigan property and Bank Fund Credit Union for the Georgia property.

. . . Cook also took out a $361,000 mortgage, originated by Bank Fund Credit Union, for a condo in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 7, 2021, Middlesex County records show. The Cambridge property has a "second home" rider that requires it be held primarily for use by the owner and not regularly rented out.

At this time, according to Wikipedia, Cook was an associate professor of economics at Michigan State University. Glassdoor indicates the salary range for a Michigan State University associate professor is $99,000 to $159,000 per year.

On that salary, she applied for $1.1 million in mortgages over a four-month period. A followup poster on the thread asked,

Regular people would never be able to take out three mortgages! I guess you're special if you're in a position of power?

But of course, she wasn't in a position of power then, she was just an associate professor. Another poster added,

It’s call Fed Gov. leverage… she knew she was on the list and so did the lender.. and in case they didn’t know, I’d bet good money she made sure they were aware.

Ah, the "list". In other words, her nomination was wired well before it took place. Wikipedia helps out, at least a little:

In November 2020, Cook was named a volunteer member of the Joe Biden presidential transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the Federal Reserve.

Before that,

Cook served as a senior economist on the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama from 2011 and 2012 — as well as a senior adviser on finance and development in the Treasury Department’s Office of International Affairs from 2000 to 2001, under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

She also had longtime ties with the civil rights wing of the Georgia Democrat Party. The specifics of her battle for nomination and confirmation as a Fed governor suggest she'd worked for years to position herself, or been positioned, as a high-profile DEI hire. Back to Wikipedia,

In 2021, Senator Sherrod Brown reportedly pushed the Biden Administration to nominate Cook to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. President Biden officially nominated Cook to be a member of the Board of Governors on January 14, 2022. She is the first black woman on the Federal Reserve's board.

It appears that Sen Brown was her champion throughout the nomination and confirmation process, which began in 2021, and it at least suggests that the mortgage applicatons took place in that context and in that time frame. The comments on the X thread embedded at the top of this post suggest that some form of influence had to have been involved in the mortgage approvals, even if Cook's formal nomination hadn't taken place.

Cook's Senate confirmation battle was lengthy, with no Republicans voting in favor and Vice President Harris casting the tie-breaking vote.

A court hearing on Cook's motion for a temporary restraining order to keep Trump from firing her as a Fed governor took place yesterday:

Friday’s court argument centered around allegations made by Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Authority Director Bill Pulte. He has claimed that Cook committed mortgage fraud before she became a Fed governor.

Late Thursday, Pulte said he made a "2nd criminal referral" to the Justice Department regarding Cook's mortgages. Pulte said it included "alleged misrepresentations about her properties to the United States Government during her time as Governor of the Federal Reserve."

. . . The Trump administration. . . asked the court to deny Cook's temporary restraining order, saying she offered no defense of the charges in public or private. "Removal for 'cause' is a capacious standard, and one Congress has vested in the discretion of the President," the administration's filing said.

The judge ended the hearing without issuing a decision. The problem I see is that there's plenty of room for more to come out about Cook's mortgage applications and any political influence that may have surrounded them, even during the current court proceedings. Certainly Abbe Lowell's protestations that the mortgages have no relevance to her position as Fed governor seem weak even now, but my sense is that more is yet to come out.