Zerohedge

Maryland’s radical sanctuary state policies under Governor Wes Moore and the Democratic Party in Annapolis have unleashed public safety threats for law-abiding taxpayers in several counties.

Real America’s Voice reporter Ben Bergquam joined ICE agents from the Baltimore branch on a ride-along as they targeted “MS-13 terrorists in suburban neighborhoods.” 

“Embedded with Baltimore ICE Field Office Director, Matthew Elliston and his team along with the Baltimore FBI office, Special Agent in Charge, Bill DelBagno, and the ATF,” Bergquam wrote on X. 

“Listen to what Matt says about sanctuary jurisdictions, and the crazy news we get after we picked up one of the MS-13 criminal illegals! These guys are all being aided and coached by leftist, activist groups and putting every one of your neighborhoods in danger.” 

EXCLUSIVE: Baltimore ICE Operations target MS-13 terrorists in suburban neighborhoods.

Embedded with Baltimore ICE Field Office Director, Matthew Elliston and his team along with the Baltimore FBI office, Special Agent in Charge, Bill DelBagno, and the ATF.

Must see and… pic.twitter.com/OZ9dCZennf

— Ben Bergquam – Real America’s Voice (RAV-TV) News (@BenBergquam) February 8, 2025

Gov. Moore and the far-left lawmakers in Annapolis have prioritized time and taxpayer monies on comforting illegal aliens in the state rather than properly addressing the public safety threat of “MS-13 terrorists” roaming city streets and urban neighborhoods. Marylanders are disgusted with local Democrats in the state as sanctuary policies have backfired.

In addition to the public safety disaster, Gov. Moore is leading the state into a fiscal crisis. The state’s credit outlook is “negative” amid repeated calls by Democrats to raise taxes, which will only increase the exodus of the tax base, thus placing the state on a dangerous death spiral—similar to Illinois—in the next decade.

Let’s not also forget Democrats in the state have mismanaged the power grid with disastrous green policies that have sparked a power crisis. Taxpayers are now furious this winter that their power bills spiked uncountably.  

The little hope that Marylanders have in ending this failed progressive nightmare comes from Trump’s deportation initiative, carried out by ICE and other federal agencies, to restore national security.

Meanwhile, a Republican sheriff of Frederick County told Newsweek last month that Gov. Moore and leftist politicians are making it their “obligation” to protect illegal alien communities. 

Marylanders did not vote for radical leftist politicians to flood the state with “MS-13 terrorists” and illegal aliens. Democrats are still not reading the room in the era of Trump, doubling down on illegal aliens and wokeism. 

If Maryland gets a credit downgrade under Moore’s tenure – then good luck trying to make a bid for president in 2028.

Authored by Roger Kimball via American Greatness,

Here we go again. At the beginning of his first term as president, Donald Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning travel from several countries – Yemen, for example, Sudan, Libya, and four others – that had been identified as major exporters of terrorism.  The left went nuts, excoriating Trump for his “racist” “Muslim travel ban.”

It wasn’t a “Muslim travel ban,” but try telling that to Seattle District Court judge James Robart. 

He sniffed the air, sensed the pleasing hysteria and press coverage, and issued a cursory restraining order against Trump’s executive order. The humorous part of Robart’s order came towards the end.  As I wrote at the time, Robart insisted that the “declaratory and injunctive relief” outlined in his order be applied immediately and on a “nationwide basis” (my emphasis).

Seattle has spoken, Comrades! Judge Robarts finds (where? how?) that his court has jurisdiction over … well, over just about everything: the president and the head of the Department of Homeland Security, for starters, but also “the United States of America (collectively).”

So all across the fruited plain, “Federal Defendants and all their respective officers, agents, servants, employees, attorneys, and persons acting in concert or participation with them are hereby ENJOINED and RESTRAINED” from enforcing the President’s executive order.

This may be the best place to pause and point out that Donald Trump, acting as the president of the United States, was perfectly within his rights to issue an executive order to suspend travel from particular countries.

And so it is now with Trump’s deputies in the Department of Government Efficiency.  

Tasked with the Herculean labor of unscrambling the byzantine Rube Goldberg device that is the 21st-century administrative state for furthering corruption, illegal payments, and partisan influence at home and abroad, DOGE commander Elon Musk and his laptop-and-algorithm-toting lieutenants have been patiently uncovering the pyramid of waste, fraud, and abuse that is the foundation of the United States government in its twenty-first-century incarnation.

In a remarkable piece called “Override: Inside The Revolution Rewiring American Power,” a blogger known as EKO showed how it worked. Four young coders arrive at the Treasury Department in the wee hours of January 21.  Within hours they have succeeded in tracing long-hidden payment directions.

No committees. No approvals. No red tape. Just four coders with unprecedented access and algorithms ready to run.

“The beautiful thing about payment systems,” noted a transition official watching their screens, “is that they don’t lie. You can spin policy all day long, but money leaves a trail.”

That trail led to staggering discoveries. Programs marked as independent revealed coordinated funding streams. Grants labeled as humanitarian aid showed curious detours through complex networks. Black budgets once shrouded in secrecy began to unravel under algorithmic scrutiny.

The difference between Trump’s first term and his second (acknowledged) term can be explained in two words: velocity and preparedness.  In 2017, Trump’s initiatives were hampered, blindsided, litigated, and smothered in red tape.  This time the Leviathan’s usual expedients are impotent. “Their traditional defenses—slow-walking decisions, leaking damaging stories, stonewalling requests—proved useless against an opponent moving faster than their systems could react. By the time they drafted their first memo objecting to this breach, three more systems had already been mapped.” And here’s the point:

“Pull this thread,” a senior official warned, watching patterns emerge across DOGE’s screens, “and the whole sweater unravels.”

He wasn’t wrong. But he misunderstood something crucial: That was exactly the point.

The left gets it. And their heads are exploding.  So far, their biggest gun was the creaky cannon Judge Robart wheeled out: the emergency injunction with immediate “nationwide effect.”

The New York Times, a house organ for anti-Trump hysteria, has a long hand-wringing column about the latest wheeze. Paul A. Engelmayer, a U.S. District Judge appointed by Barrack Obama, just issued an “emergency order” to restrict Elon Musk’s and DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment and data system.  He also insisted that anyone who had access to those systems after January 20 “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.” Fun part: even Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury, is prohibited from looking into the corrupt structures of his own department.

Engelmayer’s order came in response to a lawsuit filed on Friday by Letitia James, Attorney General of New York and professional scourge of all things Trump, along with 18 other Democratic state attorneys general. What was the charge?  The stated predicate was that by authorizing the investigation, Trump had failed in his Constitutional duty to “faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress.” The real predicate was that Musk’s beavers were uncovering the inner mechanism of the deep state and the resulting truths were unbearable.

“Humankind,” said T. S. Eliot, in “Burnt Norton,” “cannot bear very much reality.” Similarly, Bureaucrats cannot bear very much transparency.  Like vampires, the sunlight is fatal to them.

How will Trump respond?  We do not know yet.  I hope it will be at least partly as Andrew Jackson is said to have responded in his contretemps with Chief Justice John Marshall.  In 1834, the Supreme Court determined that the Cherokee Indians owned Northern Georgia. Nevertheless, Andrew Jackson evicted the Indians, reputedly observing that Marshall “has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

Lincoln responded in a similar fashion to Chief Justice Roger Taney in 1861. In April of that year, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus between Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. This allowed military commanders to imprison suspected saboteurs without indictment. Taney said (in “Ex Parte Merryman”) that Lincoln did not have the authority to do this. Lincoln basically ignored him, invoking the novel doctrine of “nonacquiesence.”

As usual, Lincoln demonstrated his deep understanding of the issues involved. “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted,” he asked Taney, “and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken if the Government should be overthrown when it was believed that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it?”

In my view, Trump’s actions to expose the partisan corruption of the administrative state are in response to an existential threat is as grave, if less bloody, than the Civil War. The permanent bureaucracy that rules us has for decades been erecting and fortifying a nearly impenetrable edifice from which to preserve its privileges and power, stifle criticism, and export its globalist agenda.  Donald Trump was elected to deconstruct that edifice. Elon Musk is one of his most potent aides in accomplishing that task.  Of course, the left is hysterical.  Their gravy train is being derailed before their eyes. The people who elected Trump are delighted.

I suspect that the squeals and tantrums of the ruling party and its minions will amount to no more than theater. I further suspect that Trump will resort not only to “nonacquiesence” but also to non-payment.  In 2022, New York received $383 billion in federal spending. There are many ways in which Trump could stanch the flow of federal dollars to obstreperous states. I think he should consider them all. I am also happy to see some official pushback.  Rep. Darrell Issa, for example, just announced that he is “immediately introducing legislation next week to stop these rogue judges and allow Trump and DOGE to tell you where government is spending your money.” Good for him.

One final suggestion. If left-wing regime-party judges can issue emergency restraining orders with “immediate nationwide effect,” why couldn’t a politically mature district judge in, say, Alabama do the same, overturning the order issued by his left-wing colleague on an “immediate, nationwide basis?”  I offer the idea free and for nothing.

President Donald Trump said Sunday that he will announce on Monday new 25 percent tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports into the United States, the Epoch Times reported.

BREAKING: President Donald Trump said he will announce 25% tariffs on all imports of steel and aluminum on Monday. https://t.co/shkCxFiYBI pic.twitter.com/81AdNnwMnf

— Bloomberg (@business) February 9, 2025

“Any steel coming into the United States is going to have a 25 percent tariff,” he told reporters Sunday on Air Force One as he flew from Florida to New Orleans to attend the Super Bowl. When asked about aluminum, he told reporters, “aluminum, too” will be subject to the trade penalties.

Trump on Sunday offered no details about the aluminum or steel tariffs. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that the new tariffs would come on top of the existing duties on steel and aluminum.

Trump also told reporters that he would soon announce “reciprocal tariffs” on Tuesday or Wednesday, meaning that the United States could impose duties on products from countries that have placed tariffs on U.S. goods.

“If they are charging us 130 percent and we’re charging them nothing, it’s not going to stay that way,” he told reporters.

Steel and aluminum were among Trump’s earliest tariffs during his first term, implementing a 25% duty on steel and a 10% duty on aluminum  in 2018 on grounds of national security.The steel tariffs also come amid a stalled deal by Japan’s Nippon Steel Corp. to buy US Steel Corp. for $14.1 billion. The transaction was blocked by former President Joe Biden and is also opposed by Trump.

Last week, Trump elaborated on the reciprocal tariffs during comments at the White House alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.

“Where a country … charges us so much, and we do the same,” he said. “I think that’s the only fair way to do it. That way, nobody’s hurt.”

Trump also said that Nippon Steel is now considering investing in US Steel instead of purchasing the company outright. Trump told reporters on Sunday that Nippon Steel cannot have a majority stake in the US firm.

During the campaign, Trump often said that he would place tariffs on a variety of goods and countries, sometimes even suggesting that the United States could abolish the income tax in favor of tariffs.

Earlier this month, he warned that he would place a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico, along with a 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods, if those countries do not curb illegal immigration or fentanyl production and trafficking into the country. Ultimately, he pushed back the Canada and Mexico tariffs by a month after leaders of the two countries agreed to strengthen their border security.

Both Mexico and Canada said they would send thousands of troops to their respective borders with the United States to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants and fentanyl trafficking. The 10 percent tariff on China took effect on Feb. 4.

Continue reading at The Epoch Times

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

The National Institute of Health (NIH) on Feb. 7 decreased the maximum indirect cost rate research institutions can charge the government to 15 percent. Indirect costs include utilities, facility, and personnel, and service contracts.

NIH predicts the change will save more than $4 billion a year.

In 2024, $9 billion of the $35 billion granted for research “was used for administrative overhead, what is known as ‘indirect costs,’” the agency said in a post on social media platform X on Friday.

“The average indirect cost rate reported by NIH has averaged between 27 percent and 28 percent over time. And many organizations are much higher—charging indirect rates of over 50 percent and in some cases over 60 percent,” the NIH said in its announcement.

The White House said in a statement Saturday that the new NIH policy is in line with what research institutions receive from private foundations.

The agency said “many of the nation’s largest funders of research—such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—have a maximum indirect rate of 15 percent.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced that the Department of Health and Human Services canceled 62 contracts worth a total of $182 million.

One of the terminated contracts was a $168,000 contract for an Anthony Fauci exhibit at the NIH Museum.

“These contracts were entirely for administrative expenses – none touched any healthcare programs,” stated DOGE, the new cost-cutting agency headed by Elon Musk, in a social media post on Friday.

The NIH has not returned a request for comment.

The changes have raised concerns by some in academia.

Jeffrey Flier, a Harvard University professor, wrote on X that cutting NIH grant indirect funding would cause chaos and harm biomedical research in hospitals, schools, and institutes around the country.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called the move illegal.

“Trump’s proposal is ILLEGAL & amounts to an indiscriminate funding cut for research centers of all sizes, NOT just Ivies. It will mean shuttering labs across the country, layoffs in red & blue states, & derailing lifesaving research on everything from cancer to opioid addiction,” she said in a statement on X.

Some lawmakers welcomed the cuts.

“Eliminating excessive ‘indirect costs’ will save the American taxpayer tens of billions of dollars in overhead expenses,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) wrote on X.

Harris, who is also a physician, said the U.S. government pays significantly more than nonprofits. He also disputed claims that the cuts would eliminate research.

“The Trump administration did not cut funding for biomedical research. Funding excessive ‘indirect costs’ is not the same as funding the research itself,” said Harris.

Elon Musk has called for the impeachment of an Obama-appointed judge who barred DOGE and the Treasury Secretary from accessing payment systems at the US Treasury.

On Friday night, Democrats went ‘judge shopping’ to ask that Musk’s team be stopped from accessing Treasury systems, knowing that instead of receiving a judge by random selection, the only available judge would be Paul Engelmayer – who held an ex-parte hearing without DOJ lawyers. Engelmayer did not cite any case law or precedent for his ruling, which many have criticized for vast overreach.

The order prohibits special government employees, along with those from outside the Treasury department, and the Treasury secretary himself, from accessing the systems.

On Saturday, Musk posted to X: “A corrupt judge protecting corruption,” adding “He needs to be impeached NOW.”

A corrupt judge protecting corruption.

He needs to be impeached NOW! https://t.co/zgnwZuOz2Y

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2025

In an earlier post, Musk wrote “it’s time,” in response to the suggestion that activist judges should be impeached.

It’s time https://t.co/DA69TdZEoN

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2025

Engelmayer’s ruling came in response to a lawsuit by 19 Democratic state attorneys general who panicked over DOGE investigating waste, fraud and abuse within the US government.

LMAO. You guys went judge shopping for a lunatic left-wing judge who issued an ex parte ruling. And you did it all to prevent Democrat corruption from being revealed.

— Jeff Carlson (@themarketswork) February 9, 2025

I read the ruling in the case against DOGE and the Treasury Department.

It’s 4 pages. It’s all boilerplate and generic language.

ZERO substantive legal analysis.

See for yourself.

This isn’t remotely credible. pic.twitter.com/SXNOKBI3KT

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) February 9, 2025

“The Court’s firm assessment is that, for the reasons stated by the States, they will face irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief,” wrote Engelmayer in his decision. “That is both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking.”

________

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President Donald Trump has directed Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to audit the Pentagon, after the Defense Department failed its seventh audit in a row.

During an interview with Fox News‘ Bret Baier set to air before the Super Bowl, Trump said he was directing DOGE to investigate both the Department of Education and the Pentagon.

“We’re going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse,” Trump said.

Trump tells @BretBaier he will direct @elonmusk and DOGE to investigate Department of Education and Pentagon for fraud and abuse. pic.twitter.com/uw1i5ZlKML

— CAPITAL (@capitalnewshq) February 9, 2025

On Friday, Trump said during a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba that he was directing DOGE to investigate “Pentgon, education, just about everything,” adding that he thinks Musk will find “a lot” of waste, fraud and abuse.

“Sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad, but I don’t think proportionally you’ll see anything like we just saw,” Trump said, referring to USAID – where the new administration has placed 97% of the staff on leave. Last week, Trump said that billions of dollars have been stolen by USAID.

Reviewing the Pentagon will be no small task for an agency which sees roughly $800 billion flow through it, and has never managed to pass its own financial audits with the exception of the Marine Corps.

The Pentagon employs nearly 3.3 million service members and civilians.

Musk, who has been appointed as a “special government employee,” is one of Trump’s key advisers, who has set a goal for DOGE to cut up to $2 trillion in federal expenses by July 2026.

This is what we’re dealing with everywhere in government
pic.twitter.com/ObsfvINEQ2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2025

Last week, DOGE claimed that it had managed to save over $1 billion by slashing contracts related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), through halting “the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, the deletion of DEI, and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations,” as The Burning Platform noted on Sunday.

On Saturday, Musk said that DOGE and the US Treasury Department have agreed to new anti-fraud measures aimed at preventing tens of billions of dollars in fraudulent government entitlement payments each year, including the following:

– Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.

– All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!

– The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.

The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from @DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn’t exist already!

Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.

When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!!

This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently defended DOGE’s actions at Treasury – telling Bloomberg in an interview with Bloomberg that the DOGE team is made up of highly trained professionals and “not some roving band running around doing things,” possibly in reference to claims by critics that DOGE has embraced and is applying the adage “move fast and break things,” which is part of the Silicon Valley start-up culture of being innovative, nimble, and disruptive.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Long shot is a huge understatement, but the sentiment alone says what you need to know.

Secession From Illinois Is in the Air

Please consider Secession From Illinois Is in the Air

As states grow more politically polarized, the difference between good and bad governance is coming into sharper relief for voters. Enough people are noticing in Illinois that some counties want to secede from the Land of Lincoln and join a state that isn’t ruled by public unions and their political yes-men.

In November, to little national notice, seven Illinois counties voted to consider seceding, and now Indiana is rolling out the welcome mat. Voters in Iroquois, Calhoun, Clinton, Greene, Jersey, Madison and Perry counties approved a nonbinding ballot question on cutting ties with Illinois. The votes weren’t close. Six of the seven counties approved the advisory question by more than 70%. Iroquois County’s vote was some 72%, and Calhoun County’s near 76%.

The Illinois fiscal mess is so great that pressure will keep building to raise taxes again and again. Pension debt was $144 billion in 2024, up from $16 billion in 2000, according to Wirepoints and the Illinois Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability.

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker called the secession idea a “stunt” and derided Indiana as a “low-wage state that doesn’t protect workers, a state that does not provide healthcare for people when they’re in need.” Illinois has a higher average income, but that’s a legacy of the state and city of Chicago’s economic glory days, which are long past.

Mr. Pritzker is essentially claiming the superiority of his welfare-state, public-union governance model. But fewer people are buying it. Since 2020, 33 Illinois counties have voted to consider breaking away from the state.

Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution says “no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”

This makes secession a high bar, since it would require Springfield’s agreement and approval from Congress. But maybe progressive lawmakers would be happy to be rid of those red counties so they aren’t regularly embarrassed by their votes to secede. Illinois Republican Rep. Brad Halbrook has introduced legislation for Illinois’s participation in the boundary commission.

When he runs for President in 2028, perhaps Gov. Pritzker can explain to voters why so many of his citizens want to flee his brand of tax-and-spend governance.

Related Posts

March 15, 2024: Congratulations to NY, IL, LA, and CA for Losing the Most Population

On a percentage basis, New York, Illinois, Louisiana, and California lost the most population between 2020 and 2023.

March 13, 2024: Chicago Teachers’ Union Seeks $50 Billion Despite $700 Million City Deficit

If you live in Illinois, get the hell out before unions take every penny you have.

August 11, 2024: Net Zero Climate Policies Could Leave the Midwest in the Dark

A cascade of net zero policies put Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois on a collision course with disaster when solar and wind fail.

November 25, 2025: When Do Mayor Brandon Johnson and the City of Chicago Finally Implode?

Chicago slashed 2,103 public safety job but added 184 administrators. The budget deficit is nearly $1 billion.

On October 5, 2019 I wrote Escape Illinois: Get The Hell Out Now, We Are

And we did in July or 2020. Hello Utah, we love it here.

Meanwhile, Illinois has only gotten worse. It’s truly incredible how the state keeps electing worse and worse governors.

And the City of Chicago had a seemingly impossible task of finding a worse mayor than Lori Lightfoot, but Brandon Johnson is not only worse, but amazingly worse.

Since secession is nearly impossible, I suggest voting with your feet.

With all the hype surrounding the Super Bowl, it’s easy to forget that in the end, it is still a sporting event.

However, if it weren’t for the spectacular halftime show and the special commercials airing during the broadcast, the Super Bowl probably wouldn’t be the global event it has become over the years.

According to a recent YouGov/Economist poll, only 30 percent of Americans said that the actual game was their favorite thing about the Super Bowl. 

You will find more infographics at Statista

Meanwhile 26 percent of respondents said they enjoyed the commercials the most and 18 percent were most excited about the halftime show, featuring rapper Kendrick Lamar, who is having quite a week after winning five Grammys last Sunday.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

The most dramatic narrative shift in this post-lockdown period has been the flip in the perceptions of government itself. For decades and even centuries, government was seen as the essential bulwark to defend the poor, empower the marginalized, realize justice, even the playing field in commerce, and guarantee rights to all. 

Government was the wise manager, curbing the excess of populist enthusiasm, blunting the impact of ferocious market dynamics, guaranteeing the safety of products, breaking up dangerous pockets of wealth accumulation, and protecting the rights of minority populations. That was the ethos and the perception. 

Taxation itself was sold to the population for centuries as the price we pay for civilization, a slogan emblazoned in marble at the DC headquarters of the IRS and attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who said this in 1904, ten years before the federal income tax was even legal in the US. 

This claim was not just about a method of funding; it was a commentary on the perceived merit of the whole of the public sector. 

Yes, this view had challengers on the right and left but their radical critiques rarely took hold of the public mind in a sustained way. 

A strange thing happened in 2020. 

Most governments at all levels across the globe turned on their people. It was a shock because governments had never before attempted anything this audacious. It claimed to be exercising mastery over the whole of the microbial kingdom, the world over. It would prove this implausible mission as a valid one with the release of a magic potion made and distributed with its industrial partners who were fully indemnified against liability claims. 

Suffice it to say that the potion did not work. Everyone got Covid anyway. Most everyone shook it off. Those who died were often denied common therapeutics to make way for a shot that clocked the highest rate of injury and death on public record. A worse fiasco would be hard to invent outside dystopian fiction. 

Participating in this grand crusade were all the commanding heights. That included mass media, academia, the medical industry, the information systems, and science itself. After all, the very notion of “public health” itself implies a “whole of government” and a “whole of society” effort. Indeed, science – with its high status earned from many centuries of achievement – led the way. 

The politicians – the people for whom the public votes and who form the one real connection that the people have with the regimes under which they live – went along but did not seem to be in the driver’s seat. Nor did the courts seem to have much role. They were closed along with small businesses, schools, and houses of worship. 

The controlling forces in every nation traced to something else we did not normally think of as government. It was the administrators who occupied agencies that were deemed independent of public awareness or control. They worked closely with their industrial partners in tech, pharma, banking, and corporate life. 

The Constitution did not matter. Neither did the long tradition of rights, liberty, and law. The workforce was divided between essential and nonessential in order to survive the great emergency. The essential people were the ruling class plus the workers who serve them. Everyone else was deemed unessential to social functioning. 

It was supposed to be for our health – government merely looking after us – but this claim lost credibility quickly, as mental and physical health plummeted. Desperate loneliness replaced community. Loved ones were forcibly separated. The aged died alone with digital funerals. Weddings and worship were cancelled. Gyms were closed and then opened later only for the masked and the vaxxed. The arts died. Substance abuse skyrocketed because while everything else was closed the liquor stores and pot shops were open for business. 

Here was when perceptions dramatically changed. 

Government was not what we thought. It is something else. It does not serve the public. It serves its own interests. Those interests are deeply woven into the fabric of industry and civil society. The agencies are captured. The largesse flows mainly to the well-connected. 

The bills are paid by the people who had been deemed nonessential and who were now being compensated for the troubles with direct payments that were created by a printing press. Within a year, this showed up in the form of inflation that dramatically reduced real income during an economic crisis. 

This huge experiment in pharmacological planning ended up flipping the rubrical narrative that had largely covered public affairs for everyone’s lifetimes. The terrible reality was being broadcast to the whole population in ways no one had ever before experienced. Centuries of philosophy and rhetoric were being shredded before our eyes, as whole populations came face-to-face with the unthinkable: government had become a grand scam or even criminal enterprise, a machinery that served only elite plans and elite institutions. 

As it turns out, generations of ideological philosophizing had been chasing fictional rabbits. This is true for all the main debates about socialism and capitalism but also the side debates about religion, demographics, climate change, and so much more. Nearly everyone had been distracted from seeing the things that matter by hunting for things that did not actually matter. 

This realization transversed typical partisan and ideological boundaries. Those who did not like to think about issues of class conflict had to face the ways in which the whole system was serving one class at the expense of everyone else. The cheerleaders of government beneficence faced the unthinkable: their true love had become malevolent. The champions of private enterprise had to deal with the ways in which private corporations participated and benefited from the entire fiasco. All major political parties and their journalistic backers participated. 

No one’s ideological priors were confirmed in the course of events, and everyone was forced to realize that the world worked in a very different way from what we had been told. Most governments in the world had come to be controlled by people no one elected and these administrative forces were loyal not to voters but to industrial interests in media and pharma, while the intellectuals we had long trusted to say what is true went along with even the craziest of claims, while condemning dissent. 

Making matters more confusing, no one in charge of this disaster would admit error or even explain their thinking. The burning questions were and are so voluminous as to be impossible to list in full. In the US, there was supposed to be a Covid commission but it never formed. Why? Because the critics far outweighed the apologists, and a public commission proved too risky. 

Too much truth could get out, and then what would happen? Behind the public health rationale for the destruction, there was a hidden hand: national security interests rooted in the bioweapons industry that has long lived under a classified cover. This is likely what accounts for the strange taboo concerning this whole topic. Those who know cannot say while the rest of us who have been researching this for years are left with more questions than answers. 

While we wait for a full accounting of how it is that rights and liberties were crushed worldwide – what Javier Milei has called a “crime against humanity” – there is no denying the reality on the ground. There was certain to be a blowback, the ferocity of which would only intensify the longer justice is delayed. 

For several years, the world had awaited the political, economic, cultural, and intellectual fallout, while the perpetrators held on hoping that the whole subject would just go away. Forget about Covid, they kept saying to us, and yet the sheer size and scale of the calamity would not go away. 

We live in the midst of that now, with minute-by-minute revelations of where the money went and who precisely was involved. Multiple trillions were squandered as the people’s standard of living took a dive, and now top among the burning questions is: who got the money? Careers are being wrecked as famous anti-corporate crusaders like Bernie Sanders turn out to be the US Senate’s largest single beneficiary of pharma largesse, exposed for the world. 

The Sanders story is just one data point of millions. The news of the sheer number of rackets is spilling out like an avalanche minute-by-minute. The newspapers we thought were chronicling public life turned out to be on the take. The fact-checkers were always working for the blob. The censors were only protecting themselves. The inspectors we believed were keeping an eye out were always in on the game. The courts keeping tabs on government overreach were enabling it. The bureaucracies tagged to implement legislation were unchecked and unelected legislatures in themselves. 

The shift is beautifully illustrated by USAID, a $50 billion agency that claimed to be doing humanitarian work but which was really a slush fund for regime change, deep-state operations, censorship, and NGO graft on a scale never before seen. Now we have the receipts. The entire agency, lording over the globe like an unchecked colossus for decades, seems destined for the trash heap. 

And so on it goes. 

Frequently overlooked in all the commentary on our times is how the second Trump administration is Republican in name only but mostly consists of refugees from the other party. Tick through the names (Trump, Vance, Musk, Kennedy, Gabbard, and so on) and you find people who only a few years ago were associated with the Democratic Party. 

Which is to say that this aggressive rooting out of the deep state is being achieved by what is a de facto third party aimed at overthrowing the establishments of the legacy ones. And this is not just in the US: the same dynamic is taking shape throughout the industrialized world. 

The entire system of government – properly conceived of not as a democratically elected conduit of the peoples’ interest but instead a complicated and unelected network of unfathomable industrial racketeering with a ruling class at the controls – seems to be unraveling before our eyes. 

It’s like the old episodes of Scooby-Doo when the scary ghost or mysterious specter has the mask removed and it is the town mayor all along, who then proclaims that he would have gotten away with it but for these meddling kids. 

The meddling kids now include vast swaths of the world’s population, burning with a passionate desire to clean up the public sector, expose the industrial scams, unearth all the secrets that have been kept for decades, put power back into the hands of the people as the liberal age promised long ago, while seeking justice for all the wrongdoing of these last hellish five years. 

The Covid operation was an audacious global attempt to deploy all the power of government – in all the directions from and to which it flowed – in service of a goal never before attempted in history. To say that it failed is the understatement of the century. What it did was unleash fires of fury the world over, and whole legacy systems are in the process of burning down. 

How deep is the corruption? 

There are no words to describe its breadth and depth. 

Who is regretting this? 

It’s the legacy news media, the legacy academic establishment, the legacy corporate establishment, the legacy public-sector agencies, the legacy everything, and this regret knows no partisan or ideological bounds. 

And who is celebrating this or, at least, enjoying the upheaval and cheering it on?

It’s the independent media, the genuine grassroots, the deplorables and nonessentials, the pillaged and oppressed, the workers and peasants who were forced to serve the elites for years, those who have been truly marginalized through decades of exclusion from public life. 

No one can be sure where this ends up – and no revolution or counterrevolution in history is without cost or complication – but this much is true: public life will never be the same for generations to come. 

As part of the ongoing ceasefire deal Israeli troops have withdrawn from the militarized zone that cut Gaza in half, called the Netzarim Corridor, and have been removed to the enclave’s eastern border, Al-Jazeera has reported. It has long commonly been called “the death zone”.

The result is that for the first time in well over a year Palestinians can freely cross between the north and south of Gaza. The corridor stretched the Mediterranean Sea, and videos show large groups of people returning to their largely destroyed communities.

Israel’s military has described that troops were “implementing the agreement” to leave the corridor in order to facilitate the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Israeli sources told the NY Times that IDF troops have already exited the Netzarim Corridor by Sunday morning. The day prior, Hamas had released three more emaciated-looking hostages. 

Hamas has declared the IDF withdrawal, which was agreed to as part of the 42-day first phase of the ceasefire, a “a victory for the will of our people, a crowning achievement for the steadfastness and heroism of our valiant resistance, and a confirmation of the failure of the goals of the terrorist aggression.”

The deal next stipulates that on day 50 of the ceasefire Israel is required to withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor.

Since major Israeli ground operations began in the wake of Oct.7, Israel has sought to order all residents of northern Gaza to flee south. However some 400,000 defied these orders and remained in their communities in the north, amid heavy battles.

“We endured famine, thirst, bombings, fear, everything. We lived among corpses, under ruins, eating food that wasn’t fit for animals. But we never left northern Gaza,” one eyewitness, Saaed Salem, told The Guardian. 

“Indescribable,” says journalist Hassan Aslih.

Scenes of extensive destruction have emerged from the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza following the withdrawal of Israeli forces this morning. pic.twitter.com/pGbjfzYEo4

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) February 9, 2025

“Each time the Israeli army ordered an evacuation before a ground invasion, I moved only to a nearby neighborhood. And as soon as the invasion ended, I was the first to return,” he said.

Meanwhile, Trump has continued pressuring Egypt and Jordan to take in the Gaza Strip’s one million plus Palestinians. But the reality is that it will simply be a non-starter and practically impossible, without Arab support. The Arabs in turn have blasted this as brazen and open ethnic cleansing campaign of historic and sovereign territory. The United Nation has also issued such condemnations.