Find my Dilbert 2025 Calendar at: https://dilbert.com/God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazonhttps://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorksFind my "extra" content on Locals:https://ScottAdams.Locals.comContent:Politics, Marc Fogel Released, Democrat Mental Health, MSNBC Propaganda, Elon Musk, President Trump, USAID Mozambique Condoms, DOGE Budget Cuts, Samantha Power Net Worth, Federal Government Fraud Magnitude, DOGE Fed Workforce Reductions, FEMA Trump Supporter Avoidance, Mike Cernovich, NewsGuard Political Censorship, The Atlantic Propaganda, DataRepublican (Small r), NGO Deep State 7 Identified, Catherine Herridge, Pharma Censorship Influence, Overpriced Government Parts, Ruy Teixeira, USAID, Palmer Luckey, Anduril Microsoft IVAS, Hamas Hell-To-Pay Speculation, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, includingmicro-lessons on lots of useful topicsto build your talent stack, please seescottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure
It's a little chilly today, so I got my comfort blanket on.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and I'm pretty sure you've never had a better time.
But if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains.
All you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine dinner of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and you're lucky enough to have it now.
Go.
So good.
You know, I've been meaning to mention this, and I keep forgetting.
Mike Johnson has the best command voice you're ever going to hear.
And what you should listen to is not just that he's got a nice-sounding voice, but that when he's talking with any authority, he always goes down on the end of the sentence.
Because if you go up at the end of your sentence, if you go up at the end of your sentence, you sound like a valley girl.
But also you sound like you're not so sure.
We should start a war and put all of our money into it.
That just sounds like you have no confidence.
But Mike Johnson, when he talks, he's got the voice thing down.
He always ends lower than he starts.
We're going to settle the budget.
We're going to get it done by Tuesday.
We're going to make sure that the country is free.
That is really, really good persuasion.
Just ending lower.
That's all you have to do.
Well, egg prices are up 15%, and inflation hit 3% this month.
That's probably what's bugging the stock market.
You know, I never thought that eggs would be like a luxury good, but I was in the grocery store the other day, and I saw I was going to get some eggs.
And there was so much activity in the egg section.
Like, people were talking, and it looked like there was going to be a fight.
There were plenty of eggs, but it looked like there was a whole thing happening.
And I just looked at it and said, nope, I'm not going to be in the middle of whatever that is, because it looks like the eggs are going to start flying.
So I didn't get any eggs.
But I'm going to save up some money and maybe get some eggs sometime.
Well, as you know, prisoner Mark Fogo was released from Russia, thanks to the good work of the Trump administration and their...
Emissaries.
Now, the big question is, why was that so easy?
What did Trump offer in return?
Now, I don't know the answer to the question, and I don't know if he offered anything in return.
But let me tell you what I think happened.
So this is pure speculation.
The only thing I'm using as my, let's say, reasoning is that The best persuader would do it this way, right?
So if you assume that Trump is really good at the negotiating thing, this is how he should have done it.
And he should do the same thing with the Hamas hostages.
And it goes like this.
Hostages are not a negotiating point.
Hostages are not a negotiating point.
You return them.
Or nothing good will ever happen to you again.
It's the opening ticket to have a conversation.
It's not part of the negotiation.
It's how you get a ticket to the negotiation.
You never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever negotiate for a hostage.
Now, we always do it, right?
We're always trading this for that.
And if you have a straight-up trade, well, some negotiation might make sense.
But if a country is just holding somebody and they're just doing it to be dicks to get a little leverage on you, that's when you tell them you have no idea what's going to come down on you if you don't release them.
This is first priority, top priority.
You do not hold an American, period.
If you hold an American, every weight that we can put at you is going to come for that one person, just for the one person.
Now, that's the only way to approach this.
But there's also a nice way to say it.
So here's what I imagine Trump did.
Hey, Putin.
Now, this could be through intermediaries, not necessarily a direct conversation.
But, hey, Putin, I've been saying some good things about you.
I've been telling people that we could work with you to end the war.
You want to end the war.
We want to end the war.
But we're not even going to have a conversation with you unless this guy comes home.
So, if you want me basically to say that you did a good job negotiating, that we got a good deal, that things are working out in some kind of a respectful way, the only way you're going to do it is return this guy right now.
We're not even going to have a conversation about Ukraine, and you can just keep losing people and losing your treasure.
We're going to give them long-term missiles.
And you just got to fix this and you got to do it right away.
Now, the carrot in that case would be to stay on good terms with Trump when everybody needs to be on good terms with him and not take the risk that this one prisoner is going to derail everything.
So if Trump does what he usually does, he injected some real risk that Putin said, I don't know what the...
I don't know what the blowback is going to be.
But since we do have a chance to end this war thing, and in a way that maybe he'd be at least a little bit happy, he's not going to blow it over one hostage.
So I think, and I don't know, I think Trump got him with nothing in return, which is the way it should have been.
That's exactly how it should have been.
But we'll see.
It could be that there was something traded.
But the country felt pretty good about it, and it made us once again remember that whatever Biden was doing was incompetent or evil or corrupt, because it feels almost a little too easy to do the things that didn't look possible under Biden.
We'll see.
According to Steve Watson, writing for Modernity, mental health experts are seeing Big increase in Democrat clients.
So a lot of Democrats with mental health problems because of the despair and burnout that they're experiencing over the Trump first 100 days or so, or whatever it's been so far.
And Axios has an article talking about that, how people are feeling burned down because they can't keep up with the rapid-fire policies of Trump.
Now, to be fair, I also feel that the pure weight of all the changes, even though I like them, so even though I'm positive about the changes, it is overwhelming.
And if you're, I guess I could call it my job in a sense, is to look at the news every day.
It's really work.
Oh my God.
You know, I love doing the podcast.
It's one of my favorite things.
So it never feels like work, but it does now.
I feel like I'm on the Doge project because I'm like, oh my God, I've got to read all the background of this NGO and how it fits into the larger architecture of everything and how everything's connected and who all the players are.
And then there'll be like seven more of those stories every day.
Every day.
So yeah, it's pretty exhausting.
And I definitely feel it on my own mental health, even though I like everything about it.
It is just so overwhelming.
So yeah, if you're a Democrat, you're probably having some tough times right now.
Well, you probably saw the video about Trump was in the Oval Office and he was talking to the press.
And Musk was there with Little X, his young son.
And Little X was stealing the show by...
Being like little John Kennedy and hanging around the Resolute desk and just basically stealing the show.
But my take on it was, wow, this is great.
It's very transparent.
You're seeing the two of them so that you can answer pretty much all questions between the two of them.
They were very open.
Musk.
Did most of the talking, I guess.
Because Doge is the big thing at the moment, so it makes sense.
And I thought it was, you know, all good.
Nothing negative.
So what do you think MSNBC thought about it?
Now that you know MSNBC and CNN are not real news, it's not just that they're fake news.
They're just part of the resistance, basically.
And they're propaganda networks when it comes to political stuff.
How do they frame it?
MSNBC's Morning Joe wants you to know that we're in a constitutional crisis and there's a lot of chaos.
There's a chaotic flow of activity.
And that Trump doesn't care what the Constitution says.
But their own legal analyst said, no, it's not a constitutional crisis.
It's working exactly within the bounds of the Constitution.
I'm paraphrasing.
But basically, you can do some stuff, and then if somebody doesn't like it, they can go to court, which they did.
And then Trump was asked, you know, what he's going to do about all these judges that keep ruling he can't do this and can't do that.
I think there are several rulings like that now.
And he said, I always obey the court.
So, yes, of course.
Whatever the court says goes.
Now, nobody was expecting that.
At least the bad guys weren't.
But, yes, they're blaming him for a constitutional crisis.
And he says, we always obey the courts.
And I was trying to think, is there any time in the past he didn't obey a court?
I couldn't think of one.
So I thought, yeah, that's exactly the right frame.
I always obey the court.
Because that really just eliminates the whole you're a dictator constitutional crisis.
Oh, if the court is involved, we'll listen to them.
Separate form of government.
Now, at the same time, it's completely legal to impeach a judge.
So that's on the table, but I don't think there's any way we can impeach a judge.
I think you need two-thirds of one of the houses or both or something.
And we never get there.
So I don't think there's any practical way.
But apparently, that's what El Salvador had to do.
So the miracle in El Salvador was being completely blocked by several of their judges at the highest court.
So they impeached him.
Now, I don't know too much about the government of El Salvador, but how did they have enough power to impeach judges, like multiple judges?
I don't know.
There's probably more to that story.
But they got away with it.
And then when those judges were gone, they rolled up all the bad guys, put them in jail, and now the country's looking pretty strong.
So it could be a thing in other countries.
I don't think it's going to happen here.
So MSNBC is going for the constitutional crisis.
And chaos.
There's chaos.
Lawrence O'Donnell says that Elon Musk...
Quote, humiliated Trump in the Oval Office.
See, they're going for the, oh, let's drive a wedge between them, because they think that Trump is a narcissist, and that if they can just get him thinking he's not the star, then suddenly they can cleave him apart.
But I think they have a complete misunderstanding of who Trump is.
Trump likes...
Not likes, loves the highest functioning people, the best athletes, the smartest people, the most capable, best entrepreneurs.
He loves excellence.
He's all about it.
And if that excellence accrues to the legacy of his office, and my God, this would, can you imagine if Musk pulls off balancing our budget?
Which looks like it's at least within reach.
Trump will forever be the best president of the United States.
So do you think he's going to get rid of Musk because MSNBC, a propaganda network, said that, oh, he's stealing your limelight.
He's taking all your attention.
No.
I think Trump is playing the long game, and he knows that if Musk succeeds...
That in 100 years, we might not remember Musk's contribution, but you'll definitely know that Trump was the best president we ever had, if he pulls that off.
So they're going for that.
Here's you, humiliated.
Of course, Joy Reid on MSNBC. She's like, oh, Elon Musk is the co-president of the United States.
The pushback is not sitting well with the co-president who held court, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's all so stupid.
That it's barely worth repeating.
You know, it was so annoying when I thought MSNBC was at least trying to be honest or trying to give the news.
Once you realize they're not trying, it's just funny.
So I just mock them.
Well, one of the things that came out of that Oval Office presser, I guess it was a presser of some kind, was the claim that...
USAID had allocated $50 million for condoms for Gaza, meaning Hamas, basically.
That turned out not to be true.
And so one of the reporters asked Musk about that and corrected him in the question.
Apparently, there is a $50 million budget for condoms, but it's for a place in Mozambique, which I think is also called Gaza.
So there was some confusion about which Gaza it was, a county in Mozambique or the Gaza that we always talk about.
And Musk's reply was that he won't get everything right.
And so it's good that they bring it up, and then he'll quickly correct.
Oh, my God.
When does a politician ever say that?
Get challenged during an open public thing and say, well, I won't get everything right.
Now, he did complete his point, which is $50 million for a condom seems like a lot, no matter where they're going, and doesn't sound like something we want to pay for.
So his point stood.
It just wasn't as clean and politically damaging as if it had been Gaza, the other Gaza.
But still.
It looks like something that the public is not going to support.
But that's like a breath of fresh air.
And one of the things that I think Musk is doing has more value than the cuts.
So let's say that Musk cuts, I don't know, one to two trillion dollars out of the budget.
That's going to look like the biggest thing anybody ever did anywhere.
Two trillion dollars per year.
That's per year.
It would save the country.
It would put us back on a good track.
It would be the biggest thing that happened in my lifetime.
But there's something he's doing at the same time that's a little bit invisible, that's bigger than that.
It's bigger than $2 trillion a year.
And that is, he's teaching us how to do it.
He's showing us systems versus goals.
He's showing us how to move fast and break things.
He's showing us how to get the best people and settle for second best, and the best people can do things that the second best people just can't ever do.
The second best people aren't just slower at getting things done than the best people.
They can't do it.
You need the smartest people in the world sometimes, and this is one of those cases.
So watching him just attack it and then be a fast Be able to quickly say, that didn't work, change it.
That didn't work, change it.
That didn't work, change it.
Oh, I got that thing wrong about the condoms?
Good.
Keep me honest.
Make sure you keep fact-checking.
That's worth more than $2 trillion a year.
Because if he can teach that, let's say, everything about the boldness of it to the methods he's using, we're going to be studying his methods forever.
And one of the methods, of course, is moving fast and overwhelming the resistance, the resistance being the bureaucracy.
So if we learn what he's doing, which is different from maybe what a lot of other people would do in the same situation, but of course he's got a longer track record of making this kind of stuff work.
If he makes this work, the United States will have a new DNA. He's reprogramming our DNA as a country.
Because we're all learning this.
We're all learning that the impossible is possible.
Can't go to the moon?
Or can't go to Mars?
Yes, we can.
Can't build an electric car?
Sure we can.
Can't put a device on your head that reads your mind?
Well, maybe we can.
Can't cut the budget?
Get out of the way.
See what happens.
So, number one, he's teaching us that you can do the impossible, but you're going to have to stay up all night.
You're going to have the best team, and you're going to have to balls to the wall, 100% commitment, lots of good partners.
You can get it done.
These are deep, deep learnings that will become part of our personalities without doing anything about it.
We're just watching.
But he's training us what works and what doesn't in these big, big, big, big situations.
That, if we learn that...
That's worth more than $2 trillion a year.
It will put us in a winning position for a generation, at least, until somebody forgets it.
Well, there's also, Doge is also looking into the federal employees who seem to have suspiciously high net worths, especially if that happened while they were working for their not-so-profitable jobs in the government.
Now, the example that people are using, I feel like it might be unfair.
Because it's focusing on one person in particular.
And there could be an explanation.
But it is sort of an organizing thing to have somebody specific to talk about with specific numbers.
So Samantha Powers, I guess she was head of USAID. And she was allegedly, she was a head until she got fired recently.
I guess her net worth went from $6 million to $30 million, even though she was paid $250,000 a year.
And people say, hmm, that's not much time has passed to make all those millions of dollars.
So how'd you do that?
Well, before we decide that she's committed some crime because she made a lot of money, we should at least consider there are possible ways you can do that.
Number one, what if she inherited?
Did anybody ask if her father was rich and died?
Nobody asked that, right?
She could have inherited.
How would we know?
Perhaps she knew somebody working at, I don't know, let's say NVIDIA. And at some point, somebody said to her, I got to tell you, this NVIDIA stuff is amazing.
You should get in on this last year.
Well, what if she had said, you know, I've got $6 million.
And there's never going to be anything like this NVIDIA again.
So I'll put a million dollars on NVIDIA. Does that give you $24 million pretty quickly?
Might.
It might, if you pick the right thing.
What if she got married and her husband was rich?
Would that show up?
Would we have noticed that?
Now, I'm not saying she did.
I have no information about it whatsoever.
But...
If you think that the only way she could have made that money that quickly is corruption, let me just, you know, brainstorm a little bit innocent until proven guilty, right?
Samantha Powers is innocent until proven guilty, and I have no evidence, no evidence that she committed a crime.
It's just there's a little bit of a flag there, and maybe if somebody looks into it, they'll say, oh, you inherited an estate.
Cool.
That's the end of the question.
But there will be other people that I think will be a little more suspicious, and probably all of them have to be looked into.
So I don't like targeting a person and then looking for a crime, and I don't love the fact that if somebody has a lot of money, that's automatically suspicious.
There are people who make a lot of money quickly in ways that are illegal.
It does happen.
So we'll see.
Elon Musk today and X talking about the size of the potential fraud in the government.
He said this.
He said at this point, now keep in mind he's looked into things, you know, not comprehensively, but he's seen quite a bit so far.
He says at this point, I'm 100% certain.
That the magnitude of the fraud and federal entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, disability, etc., exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you've ever heard by far.
Now, because they're such big entities, it wouldn't take much for it to be the biggest scandal in American history.
And I wouldn't be surprised.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a bigger scam and scandal than anything we've ever seen.
You know, I'll say again, for years I've wondered why there are so many rich people, right?
I know how I made my money, and everybody else does too.
It's like, oh, you're the Dilbert guy.
Yeah, that worked out for you.
And if somebody is like the CEO of a company, I go, oh, okay.
You know, startup, entrepreneur.
Oh, okay.
And some people inherit, right?
So there are lots of ways people make money, but I feel like there are too many rich people.
As in, some of that's got to be crime.
If you took the entire universe of rich people who just have nice houses on the hill when you drive by and you go, wow, that's a lot of people with big houses up there.
I'll bet you.
I'm just going to tell you, there's no backing to this opinion.
I'll bet 25% of our rich people are crooks.
I'll bet 25%.
I'll bet some of them are working with cartels.
Some of them are drug dealers.
Some of them stole from our government in clever ways.
Some of them are on the take.
I'll bet 25% of our rich people are just criminals.
That's just a guess.
So, yeah, GOP Representative Eli Crane is putting some impeachment articles together for the judges who...
Are trying to stop the DOGE project in various ways.
I don't think he's going to have any success.
Like you said, I think he needs two-thirds, and there's no way you get two-thirds in this environment.
There's a new executive order for DOGE, and it puts the Office of Management and Budgets, OMB, puts them in charge of coming up with a plan to make the federal workforce smaller.
Now, here's what I like about this.
I think it's a bad look if Doge is the one who's doing all the cutting.
If the Office of Management and Budgets, reporting to the president, decides, hey, okay, here's our plan for downsizing.
And then Doge is both contributing to the plan, telling them what to downsize and what the plan should look like, maybe.
But the OMB has the final decision.
That looks like a good model to me.
Because then you don't have the Doge as like a second president.
Now you've got a president who's in charge of the OMB, and the OMB just says some guidelines for Doge.
Perfect.
Yeah.
As long as the head of the OMB is a solid person, that's going to work.
So I like that.
But there's more to it.
This new executive order is fairly massive in its impact, potentially.
So there's a rule in it that says any of the agencies in the government that want to add an employee can only do it if they get rid of four.
So you're really, really going to need that new employee because it's going to cost you four existing employees.
Now, Trump did that same kind of model with regulations, and apparently it worked.
So we know something like that could work.
We'll see.
Let's see.
And then the Doge team will have embedded team leaders to do continued oversight over agencies during the downsizing and presumably after.
So I like that because they would basically be like auditors, but there may be, at some point, they may need to be more official, meaning that at the moment, reporting to Musk is exactly the right answer.
But at some point, if everything succeeds, Musk is going to want to pull himself out of the day-to-day, and maybe at that point they report to the OMB. Just report to the OMB, and then it looks like an official structure, because it would be, and that would maybe make people more comfortable with it.
Apparently, the new hires also have to be, according to the executive order, approved by some of the Doge team leads.
I'm not sure why we need that.
Because if they added the OMB... Well, I guess it's because there'll still be a lot of Democrats in these agencies.
They might try to pull in a trumpeter or somebody dangerous.
So yeah, I guess that makes sense.
You've got to make sure they don't hire some people who are not good for the country.
And anyway, so that's a really big deal.
But I like the framing of it, putting the OMB... In the mix.
According to The Hill, the FEMA employee who famously told some of the FEMA people to not knock on the doors and try to help people with Trump signs.
So apparently that person violated the Hatch Act.
So I guess the Hatch Act is when you're doing political stuff that you shouldn't be doing political stuff.
They should be just doing disaster stuff.
Now, there's no...
I don't know if there's a smoking gun in terms of somebody was injured by this policy, but at the base of it, the person who was involved seems to have argued that safety was the reason behind it.
So I guess there's no question about what happened.
Yes, people were informed.
Don't necessarily knock on the door of a Trump supporter with a Trump sign.
Why was it that they ever thought a Trump supporter would be dangerous if FEMA knocked on the door to try to help them?
In what world do you think it's dangerous to knock on the door of a Trump supporter?
Does anybody live in that world?
That's like a reality I don't understand.
If you told me the only thing that you know about the House is that it's a Democrat or Republican, Would one of those be scarier than the other?
Well, if it's an upscale house, I wouldn't care.
Upscale house, nobody's going to be opening fire when you knock on the door.
But let's say it's a low-income house.
Would you be more afraid of a low-income Democrat or a low-income Republican in the context of a disaster in which everybody needs help and FEMA is helping everybody?
In what world?
Does a Trump supporter go nuts in that case?
Even if they didn't like what FEMA was doing, you think they're going to pull a gun out?
In what world?
This is basically the fake news just ruined FEMA because they believe some kind of weird, you know, I don't know, maybe that Trump supporters are part of the secret resistance of white supremacists hiding in the mountains or something.
Crazy stuff.
Crazy.
Well, I saw a post today by Mike Cernovich that spoke to me.
So I want to read his post.
It definitely feels like a sign of the times kind of indicator.
And then I want to tell you what I reposted in the same vein, or at least I hope it's in the same vein.
So Mike Cernovich posted on X. I think it was this morning or last night.
He said, I don't want to speak carelessly or with bravado, but I'm not going back.
I will not submit, ever or in any way, to what we lived under four years ago, a hostile, occupating regime.
I just won't.
Now, that was exactly what I was feeling.
So this is what Sertovich does.
He finds the exact emotional lever, and he found mine.
So here's what I added to it, because this is what I've been thinking about a lot in the last 24 hours, even before I saw Mike's post.
I said yesterday I was remembering how innocent we were in 2016, or at least I was.
We just preferred Trump.
No big deal.
Then came the shaming, the canceling, the physical threats, the intimidation, the social stigmas, the economic attacks, the fake news, the corruption, and eventually the revelation of the entire corrupt architecture of the country.
Now we're smarter and not so innocent.
We're tougher.
We're bad.
And we have reinforcements that are more powerful than anything we've ever seen.
We're not just supporters with a preference this time.
Now it's ride or die.
We will protect the Constitution.
We will right the ship.
Decisions have been made.
Decisions have been made.
We're not going to lose this.
We're going to protect the country.
We're going to protect the public.
We're going to protect the Constitution.
And we're going to make America great again.
And nothing is going to stop it.
Nothing.
Speaking of things trying to stop things, you remember NewsGuard?
So NewsGuard was this non-government organization that was going to help all the various countries get rid of their misinformation.
And, of course, it wasn't really a misinformation thing.
It was a political censoring vehicle pretending to help you with misinformation.
So here's what happened.
Apparently, they had on their website, NewsGuard did, that Microsoft was one of the companies that they were helping with misinformation.
Microsoft disavowed them.
In response.
So I guess Ted Cruz, Senator Cruz, wrote to Microsoft and said, is this real?
Are you really backing NewsGuard now that we know that it's just a completely illegitimate, corrupt organization pretending to be about misinformation, but really just being part of the uniparty crushing the opposition?
And Microsoft, instead of what you might have imagined during the Biden administration, but we don't know.
They just said, you better take us off your website because we're not funding you and we're not working with you, basically.
I'm paraphrasing.
But Microsoft just said, nope.
Nope.
Thank you, Senator Cruz, for bringing this to our attention.
Nope.
News guard, don't associate with us.
Now, would that have happened under Biden?
Or do you think there's an awakening that has reached basically everybody in power at this point?
I feel like there's an awakening.
So did you know?
Let's see.
So how bad is NewsGuard?
Let me give you some meat on the bones if you want to know how bad they are.
NewsGuard claims that some outlets are misinformation and some are not.
So here's the ones they call misinformation and then the ones they say are not.
They said misinformation was the Federalist, the Daily Wire, and Newsmax.
They're called, quote, unreliable.
Well, these are the outlets they think are reliable.
The Jacobin?
I don't even know what that is.
The Atlantic?
The Atlantic?
And the New Republic are deemed reliable.
The Atlantic is literally the most famous propaganda not even trying to be...
Anything but propaganda?
Now, if you didn't know that, you might say, huh, okay, this is helpful.
Here's a list of bad sites and good sites.
But anybody who's paying attention even a little bit knows the Atlantic is just a Democrat propaganda.
I don't think it exists for any other reason.
I doubt it's making money.
Isn't it owned by Jobs' widow?
And doesn't it look like the only reason it's still alive is so they can write hit pieces on Trump?
It's the most corrupt thing you could possibly imagine that, first of all, there is something that exists like that, but secondly, that NewsGuard has blessed it as an accurate source and says the Federalist is not.
Now, I don't know about you, but I've read a lot of stories in the Federalist.
I don't remember any misinformation.
Do you?
Like, I don't remember any, you know, every news entity gets things wrong.
But what?
I mean, these are all news sources that I have familiarity with.
You know, Newsmax may get things wrong.
They may be biased in their attacks.
Of course, the news is biased.
But that's a big difference between bias and misinformation.
So, yeah, this is completely corrupt.
There is an account on X that has been getting some attention lately, and it's an anonymous account, and I would love to know who's behind it.
The account is called Data Republican.
We don't know if it's male or female or more than one person involved, so it's anonymous.
But Data Republican's been apparently doing some good work, sniffing out things that the data...
You know, looking for red flags.
And one of the things that Data Republican put on X, so you should follow Data Republican.
If you're on X, it's one word, Data Republican.
You should follow it.
And when I tell you this story, you're definitely going to want to follow it.
So the idea is that Data Republican discovered seven NGOs out of the massive thousands of NGOs.
So this was hard.
Found seven NGOs that are partially funded by American taxpayers that appear to be the key players within the so-called Deep State Uniparty.
And one of the ways that they're identifiable is that they all have something like democracy in their name.
So, democracy enhancing, democracy helping, universal democracy helping.
The agency to democratize democracy and all good democracy things.
So that's one of the signals that they're not giving, like, let's say, foreign aid for AIDS or trying to help the poor.
There's something about democracy.
And they're well-funded, and there's seven of them.
And that explains why Trump is being called domestically.
A threat to democracy.
Do you see it now?
So we had these NGOs that were originally set up to battle for democracy against, let's say, the Soviet Union.
They might have a different model.
Or against anybody else who was actually not democratic that we wanted to be on our democracy side.
So they were external facing things.
And then suddenly, this president, President Trump, He's being called a threat to democracy.
Have you ever heard that before?
Has any prior president ever been called a threat to democracy?
Well, probably, you know, here and there, but not like something that all the entities are repeating every single day.
You know, threat to democracy, threat to democracy, threat to democracy.
That's organized.
And there's no way it's accidental.
It allowed these seven...
Well-funded entities to turn their cannons internally at our domestic situation and try to turn Trump into what they're imagining he is, a threat to democracy.
So that is what I mean by the entire corrupt architecture of the country is being revealed.
I'm seeing a picture of Bill Kristol going by.
Yes, he was getting some money from an NGO, and everything was just what you thought it was.
We didn't know who was involved, but you could feel the coordinated evil, because they all talked the same.
You know, MSNBC and CNN and New York Times, they'd all start using the same words, like, hmm, looks like there's a constitutional crisis.
Constitutional crisis, constitutional crisis.
But that used to work.
Today, I wake up and Elon Musk has a post on X laughing about all the different media using the same term.
And there's a whole list of them.
Oh, it's a constitutional crisis.
Look at the constitutional crisis.
Even MSNBC couldn't get their own legal analyst to call it a constitutional crisis because nobody's defied any of the Constitution.
We've done stuff.
And the court will challenge it, and then the court will decide if we can do it, and if we can't do it, we'll try something else, which might include impeaching a judge, which is also constitutional.
It wouldn't work, but...
So, yeah, there you go.
We can now see kind of clearly that Democrats were just feeding off the teat of...
These NGOs, it was a way to launder money into their favorite things, keep them in power, and enrich them.
You know, not every single one, but clearly it was thievery, corruption, and pure evil.
And we're getting really close to having all the receipts.
Really close.
Now, when I talked earlier, you know, about Mike Cernovich's post and my response, Think about all the people who are pro-Trump who are risking their life and their careers right now.
Think about it.
Mike Benz is one.
Mike Benz is the one who taught us this whole NGO architecture and how it all works.
And he said on X that he's in physical danger, probably.
I think that's true.
I think he's in physical danger.
Did he quit?
Nope.
Is Trump in physical danger?
Yes.
In fact, I said the other day that there was some kind of event where Trump, Steve Scalise, and Mike Johnson, three top Republicans, were on the stage at the same time.
Two of them had been shot by Democrats, or at least somebody who didn't like them.
Two out of three, shot.
Did Steve Scalise retire?
Nope.
He's standing on the stage.
Did Trump retire?
Nope.
He's standing on the stage.
Did Melania tell Trump to retire?
Doesn't look like it.
It looks like she's all in.
I mean, I'm just guessing.
I can't read her mind.
But am I in danger?
Of course I am.
I mean, maybe not physical danger, but I got canceled.
You know, my reputation is destroyed.
I'm all in.
I got nothing left to lose.
If you look at how many people are risking their physical life, how about Musk?
Do you know how much security Musk needs right now?
A lot.
Do you know how much risk the doge people are taking?
A lot.
Physical, career, reputation, a lot.
I've never seen any situation where so many, I guess you'd call them normal people, decided to ride or die.
This time, we feel that this is a 1776 moment, ideally without the muskets.
I think we can do this without the muskets, so that would be first choice.
But we are putting our lives on the line.
We are genuinely putting our whole lives, our reputation, our economics, ability to feed the family, and even our lives all on the line.
No regrets.
We're all in.
Now, this is an example of what Greg Gottfeld calls the shared risk.
I don't do it because it's a shared risk.
But boy, does it help to know that I'm not the only person putting myself out there.
That lots of people are putting everything on the line.
Everything.
Musk is risking everything.
Everything.
And he's doing it right in front of you.
It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen.
So just think about the number of people that you know that are Trump supporters who have been in physical danger, career danger, social danger.
It's a pretty big list.
And none of them are backing down.
Look at Alex Jones.
Not backing down.
He's doubling down, but he's not backing down.
And you could probably make a list of 25 people that took a serious hit for doing what they thought was right.
And now, we're not going to take it anymore.
We're not going back.
It's just not going to happen.
So, Catherine Herridge was talking on a podcast recently.
She said, you know Catherine Herridge, a well-respected journalist.
She said she got fired at CBS News.
And then made a choice to go independent.
And she said her first investigation on COVID, injury in the U.S. military, and she said that X was the only platform where they could put the results of their investigation.
X was the only place an honest journalist could tell an honest story.
Think about that.
Because most of them take pharma advertising.
So, you know, X maybe has some too, but it's not driving any decisions.
I don't know if there are any on X, actually.
So did Catherine Herridge take some risks?
Oh, yeah.
Yep.
Catherine Herridge took some risks.
Now, I wouldn't say that she's pro-Trump because she's such a good journalist.
I don't know.
That's exactly what you want.
That's almost the definition of a good journalist, or a great journalist, is that you don't know who they support.
They're just telling you what they found.
But she's brave, and she had to pay.
Fox News has a story that I think is probably fake news, but still useful.
This would be useful fake news.
The story is that, I guess the Pentagon...
It has some bills they paid, $1,300 for coffee cups.
I don't know how many coffee cups that was.
And I think that was like per coffee cup or something, $1,300.
And then an 8,000% overpay for soap dispensers.
So Doge is finding these kinds of expenses.
Now, here's what you need to know.
I did not do any research on this specific story.
I'm going to give you a general statement.
Since the 60s, the same story comes out at least once a year.
Oh, the Air Force charges a billion dollars for a hammer.
Oh, this one screw for this door was $50,000 every year since the 60s.
Now, first of all, would you all agree that you've all seen this story, a version of this story, every year you've been alive?
It never stops.
And did you know none of them are true?
Did you know that?
It's always the same reason.
Let's say I'll give you an example just to, and by the way, this is just a made-up example, but it'll give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
Let's say Air Force One had some special equipment that nobody else in the world had and some design things that didn't exist anywhere else.
And then later, 20 years later, Because the airplanes last a long time.
Somebody says, oh, we need to add a cup dispenser.
Or we need some cups that will fit the dispensers that are already on the plane.
Or they need to be some special kind of cups that, I don't know, don't leak or something.
Well, to make that little tiny order of whatever it is that Air Force One needed but nobody else will ever need anywhere, they might have to develop part of a factory.
They might have to buy equipment to manufacture that thing.
They might have to design it, because they don't have to design anymore.
And then they manufacture it.
When they're done, they spend a million dollars to make something that you think should be worth five dollars.
But it actually cost a million dollars.
And there wasn't any other way to do it, except build the factory, build the piece, put all the overhead in it, and try to get it.
Now, I want to be very careful because I know half of you are so mad at me right now that you can't hear the next thing I say.
So I'm going to say it three times to get through your wall of anger.
It's probably still overpriced.
That's the first time.
It's probably still overpriced.
That's the second time.
Now, this one should penetrate your wall.
It's probably still overpriced.
So don't argue with me about whether it's overpriced.
I concede that.
But it's probably never overpriced in the way that you think it is, that it only cost them a nickel to make it and they charged a billion dollars.
That's almost never true.
It's usually some overhead, that special case, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So even though it's fake news, in my opinion, again, without doing any research on this specific case, it's always fake news, has been since the 60s.
It's really useful.
Because the public doesn't know it's fake news.
So they say, what?
The Pentagon's charging me a billion dollars for a hammer?
We're going to have to go in there and shake things up.
Well, if what you want to do is go in there and shake things up and cut costs, it's really useful if the public thinks that they are charging a billion dollars for a screw.
It's really useful, because then you can get the support.
Likewise, The same strategy is being used on the cuts for USAID. If you told the real story to the public, okay, public, the reason that these weird little charities exist is not because somebody really, really cared about the trans events in Uruguay, for example.
It's because we're trying to control Uruguay, and teaming with the trans community gave us a little bit of capacity building.
So that we'd have a little more leverage over Uruguay.
Now, that's the story that the government can't tell you.
And even Trump can't tell you that.
And I don't think Elon Musk is going to say that in a press release, because it basically aunts our entire intelligence operation.
USAID is basically just a front for the CIA. This would be the Mike Benz version of reality.
And if you see it as a front for the CIA, the real argument is...
Do we need the CIA doing this stuff?
Now, I think the answer is no.
I think that probably we can get what we want without doing this stuff.
And that maybe it is going too far and it was too easy to get money for anything.
So, you know, maybe there's some of this stuff that needs to happen for intelligence reasons and for legitimate protection of the Republic.
But probably the best thing is to cut it all.
And then have whoever needs it make a better argument and then add it back if we need it.
That's probably what makes sense.
But notice how complicated that is?
Wait, what are you saying?
You're saying that USAID is just the CIA? Well, do you have a document that proves that?
No.
Nobody could possibly have a document that proves that.
You can get there by inference.
You can get there because somebody told you and you've been around it and you know what it really is.
Maybe you've worked in the CIA so you know exactly what's going on.
But there's no document.
I don't think Trump and Musk could come up with, oh, here's the memo.
Look right here.
It says everything we do is for the CIA. No.
They can't prove it.
So what are they going to do?
So you do the thing like the million-dollar hammer.
You just tell the public something they can understand.
Maybe we shouldn't be spending $50 million on condoms for Mozambique.
And then the public says, oh yeah, I don't know much about this topic.
I've never heard of USAID before.
But yeah, that's a lot of money for condoms.
I think I'd rather save that money.
And then you just go down the line.
All right, do you want to support trans events in Uruguay?
No, no I don't.
Yeah, shut that thing down.
Oh, there's more.
They're also doing DEI in Slovenia.
DEI in Slovenia?
Are you kidding me?
Get rid of that.
Get rid of the million-dollar hammers.
Get rid of it all.
Close it down.
Go, Musk.
So there is a veneer of bullshit over what we're saying, but for a good purpose.
The public, it would be hard to bring the public up to speed.
On what's really going on in the real world.
It's painful to figure out what's real.
It's painful.
And most people aren't going to even want to put it into work.
So, yes, if you could make the argument based on ridiculous expenses in the context of our budget being way out of control, if it works, it works.
There's a Democrat progressive analyst, he's being called.
He's worked with a lot of top Democrats.
A guy named Rui Texiera.
Now, so the first thing you need to know is that he's deep in the Democrat world.
So he's not a Republican.
He's a deep Democrat.
And here's something he said recently.
He said that in policy terms, the Democrats have a point about the legality of Doge's efforts.
So, yes, I would acknowledge that there is an argument out there that Doge needs to be within the frame of legal activity.
Of course.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And if it isn't, I'd like people who are smarter than me to figure that out, and then we'll adjust.
We'll make whatever adjustment needs to be necessary.
So the questions about whether Doge is legal or not legal, I think that's fair game.
And so does he.
That's fair game.
I mean, I don't like how it's working out because it's slowing things down, but you can't say it's not fair to ask if something's legal.
That's the first question you should ask.
Is that legal?
And if we don't know for sure, let's work through the process.
Let's go through the courts.
Let's figure out if it's legal.
Well, here's the more interesting thing he said.
He says that Trump occupies the high ground in this fight.
Meaning that all of the USAID aid looks like things that the public doesn't want, right?
So even though they do basic stuff or the claim is that USAID is doing some real charity, there are so many things like DEI in Serbia's workplace that if Trump says we're going to cut the DEI program in Serbia that you're paying for, who exactly is going to argue with that?
Again, if you were...
If you were in the CIA and you knew there was some reason for that, you would argue, but you're not going to do it in public.
So the public argument, Trump and Musk completely own.
They've got the high ground.
Look at what they're doing with your money.
Nobody wants their money wasted.
There's no cohort who says, you know, I'd like a little more corruption.
I wouldn't mind if you spent some of my money.
Rui Teixeira is saying that, you know, Trump's got the high ground here.
You might as well just surrender at this point, unless the courts can stop it.
And then finally, you know, Palmer Luckey invented the virtual reality goggles for Facebook, and then there was a falling out.
With Facebook, and he went off on his own.
He started Anduril, a military device company.
So he's got a number of different products, drones, and kind of high-tech things.
So he's specifically in the higher end of the technology.
So that's sort of his domain that he carved out there.
And apparently Anduril Industries has now been selected to lead the development and production of the...
The Army's Integrated Visual Augmentation System, which is, I think, you put on the goggles and you see the real world, but there is stuff that's added to it, enhanced reality.
So maybe the stuff added to it is somebody communicating with you, a map of something over the hill, how much energy you have, how much power you have in your batteries.
So I don't know what it would be.
But one does imagine it would be really, really helpful to have basically, I don't know if there's any AI in it, but probably there will be.
So we would be sending out basically super soldiers who had all the abilities of robots, basically, but on top of that, human abilities.
So, yeah, this could be kind of a big thing.
I guess they're going to work with Microsoft on this.
So it could be a big deal.
Meanwhile, you know that Trump has threatened that if Hamas doesn't give up the remaining hostages, which include possibly two Americans that might be alive, but we don't know for sure.
He said that if it doesn't happen on Saturday by noon, and we don't know which time zone he's talking about, but he says Saturday at noon, if they don't release all the hostages instead of what he thinks is stalling, there's going to be hell to pay.
Oh, Nicole Shanahan is going to have an interview with Data Republican.
There you go.
Look at the risks that Nicole Shanahan and RFK Jr. took.
You see the size of the risks that people are taking.
People are just laying it out.
They're just laying down, laying out their whole lives.
It's so inspiring.
And Nicole is one of the most inspiring people in the game right now.
So anyway, if Hamas doesn't give back the hostage, they'll be hell to pay.
Now, the first thing I think to myself is, there's something non-Trumpy about this.
Because there is a process that's already agreed, and although it's not moving as quickly as possible, every time a hostage gets released, that's a really big deal.
Even one hostage extra would be a big, big deal.
And that's the way we should treat it.
On the other hand, you can't let the terrorists, you know, manipulate you.
So Trump has said there will be hell to pay.
I didn't know what hell to pay would mean.
I saw some analysts on some show describe some of the options.
One would be to cut the aid because apparently they can't really eat.
You know, the non-militants can't eat because there's no food in Gaza.
So if it doesn't come from the outside and Israel doesn't let it in and there isn't enough of it, They don't eat.
So that's a pretty big deal.
Now, I guess Hamas is claiming that's why they're slowing down the hostage release, because they say the aid is not coming enough for fast stuff.
Now, I don't know if that's true, but it's going to get worse if they don't release the hostages.
So one thing we could do is cut their food off, but we could also cut their utilities, could cut their water and their electricity.
There's still a little electricity and maybe a little water somewhere.
They could cut it off.
Now, that would be, of course, punishing the civilians more than the fighters, but everybody has an option of being there or not being there at this point.
It could include emptying Gaza of all the civilians, as in a forced exit, as in now you don't get a choice.
All civilians, every one of you is leaving every part of Gaza, and then we're just going to stomp everything that's left.
We're going to kill all the tunnels, kill every person in Hamas.
And start over.
Now, here's what I'm speculating.
Part of the context of this is that the most recent hostages, which we believe were released in the order of healthiest firsts, everybody who saw them, the healthiest ones that are remaining, the healthiest ones, look like Holocaust survivors.
They're never going to be the same.
So if there's a delay and the healthiest ones look like Holocaust survivors, what does that suggest to you?
What it suggests to me is there may not be anybody left alive.
What it suggests to me is that if there is somebody who is alive, they might not even want to be at this point.
That whatever is left is going to be horrible beyond imagination.
And it makes me wonder if Trump maybe knows a little bit more than we do about the likely situation for the remaining hostages.
It's possible that the reason they're delaying it and claiming that they need new food is they don't have another living one, and they don't have one that hasn't been raped, and they don't have one that's not missing limbs.
Whatever is left...
As much as the families, of course, would want them, as important as that is, Trump might not know.
He might know that there's not much left.
It might be that bad.
And he would know more than we would, and he's got a good sense for these things.
So if the reason for Hamas's delay is because they don't have anything to give us, he's pressing the point.
Now, he always has the option of backing off.
You know, if a mouse said, oh, oh, oh, we'll do this or that, he has an option, because remember, he's a negotiator.
So he doesn't have to use his threat if he gets something that seems like it's progress.
And the construction has started near me, so it's going to get noisy.
So I would normally say...
You should wait to see if you got the hostages back because a few more weeks isn't going to kill anybody.
Well, I shouldn't put it in those terms.
It might kill somebody.
But I think maybe Trump is playing this right.
I think he's pressing them to prove that they even have a hostage and they don't have evidence that there's a living hostage left.
I don't think.
I don't think there's any evidence of it.
So it could be that he's pressing them to prove somebody's still alive.
And if they can't prove somebody's still alive in the next few days, I think Gaza is just going to become a burial ground for whoever's left.
And Trump's very clear about it.
Very clear about it.
Now, I don't know where everything's going to go, but it is a strong stance.
And I have respect for it, even if it turned out...
To not be an optimal outcome feels like the right time to push and the right way to push.
So I'm going to support that.
All right, that's all I got for you today.
Thanks for joining.
I'm going to talk to the people on Locals privately.
If you're on X or YouTube or Rumble, thanks for joining.
