FEMA, under the leadership of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, has been somewhere between ineffective, absent, and adversarial in response to the devastating flooding in Appalachia. The agency is also running out of money, having diverted its budget to facilitating an invasion of illegal aliens into the US. Most shockingly, this is a surprise to almost no one.
The Secret Service seems to no longer have the capability – or inclination - to protect the Republican presidential nominee from the most obvious threats. Once unthinkable, the magnitude of this reality under Kimberly Cheatle’s highly politicized leadership is somehow not even shocking.
The Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, stated last week that she "hasn't been particularly involved" regarding the port workers strike that was impending. Of course she hadn’t been. And that surprised almost no one.
In any normal administration, the name of the Transportation Secretary would be unknown, but with repeated transportation calamities, we have come to know that Pete Buttigieg is a hapless figurehead who is completely uninformed about transportation industries and the movement of goods in this country.
I could go on and on, to include NOAA, the CDC, the FDA, NASA, the Pentagon, etc.
The core issue is that the American public no longer has any expectation that federal agencies can provide their core services, nor that the “leadership” of those agencies has any ability to run them. We understand now that those in charge are simply given these positions as political rewards, and to use those agencies to advance the greater left-wing political agenda against the establishment’s political enemies. Sadly, those political enemies include about half of the country.
I’ve started to write an essay about this several times, with the thesis being that the rot in these institutions is such that they are beyond salvaging, and that if there is any good news about the situation, it’s that this widespread collapse in confidence provides a rare opportunity for a reformer to start cleaning house. I’ll be voting for that reformer in a couple of weeks.
But I just read a couple of other great essays in the past few days, so instead, I am going to quote from those. I cannot summarize the situation any better than Jeffrey Carter and T.J. Harker did in these pieces. There is much more in their essays than I have excerpted, so I encourage you to click and read them in full.
1) Jeffrey Carter: “Total and Utter Incompetence”
Mayor Pete and the Department of Transportation are nowhere to be found. They must be working on high-speed rail while I-40 and I-26 are crumbling.
Secretary Mayorkas was predictably MIA. He stated FEMA, an agency he oversees, needs more money to handle the situation. That guy would screw up a one-car funeral. He is so incompetent.
Of course, Kamala Harris and Mayorkas spent $1B of FEMA money on illegal aliens. That fact should be particularly galling to anyone. It shows government money no matter where it is budgeted is fungible. It also shows where the priorities of people like Harris are. They aren’t with citizens of the US, but with illegals they helped come in.
It’s very clear to many, many Americans that government and institutions we used to rely on don’t have our best interests at heart, and they do not “work for citizens” anymore. They pursue their own interests, and are corrupted by the people at the top who are pursuing a far different agenda than what was originally intended by both government and private non-profit institutions. Hence, they are indeed rational in voting against them.
I think Americans will be amazed at how competent the government can be if they vote the Democrats out. This assumes that Trump and the Republicans go full-on Argentina Mileil and cut the chaff out of government. Trump has asked Elon Musk to do it, and he said he would.
Musk eliminated 80% of the jobs at X and it’s better run and a better site. Musk rescued astronauts in space when big government couldn’t do it. Musk got the internet to Appalachia and is saving lives post-hurricane, and the government can’t.
Seems like he knows how to execute. Clearly, Kamala and her political party cannot.
2) T.J. Harker: “The Mediocre Men”
For decades, our ruling elite have been hard at work destroying the foundations of Western Civilization.
The list of things they “own” is long, but certainly includes gutting American culture, normalizing perversion, losing wars, dumbing down education, offshoring our manufacturing base, bankrupting the treasury, adulterating our food, opening our borders, debasing the dollar, impoverishing our citizenry, indoctrinating our children, pursuing social pipe dreams, immiserating blacks, collapsing our legal institutions, mocking empirical science, and ridiculing our history.
At the same time, this ruling elite celebrates itself in the smug self-confidence that its Herculean efforts have brought us to the doorstep of a carbon-free, social-justice utopia. In reality, however, it has foisted upon America an intergenerational catastrophe of biblical proportions. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never in human history have so few squandered so much on behalf of so many.
Invariably, the mandarin servants are unimpressive people with bland personalities and tiresome thoughts. They are masters of “failing upward” by being just bright enough to grasp the career advancement opportunities available to those who agree to parrot embarrassingly stupid leftist tropes. At the same time, they are not bright enough to formulate anything resembling a real thought or to demonstrate any real skill by which they might distinguish themselves or, you know, contribute to our civilization. They are one of the many symbols of our decadent and dying culture.
Thank you Jeffrey Carter and T.J. Harker.
I’ll conclude by noting that for decades we’ve listened to establishment Republicans repeatedly lie to the conservative base about “reducing the size of government.” Some have even promised to eliminate unnecessary government agencies such as the Department of Education. They never meant it, of course, just like they were always lying about securing the border. Fortunately, we do not need to place our hopes for reform on the backs of establishment RINOs any longer.
Donald Trump is different. He did secure the border in his first term, which he will do again in his second term, and he also has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to slay the bureaucratic leviathan, which it should be noted, has spent the past 8 years trying to slay him.
The widespread collapse of confidence in government agencies, coinciding with the re-election of Donald Trump, is a critical moment in this country’s future. We’ve never a had better opportunity to dismantle the bureaucratic state.
[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]