Friday, February 21, 2025
STEPHEN MILLER WELCOMES MISERABLE PRESS AND RECOUNTS TRUMP'S HISTORIC FIRST 30 DAYS: "No president comes close to what President Trump has achieved over just the last 30 days"
Stephen Miller (@stephenm): "I want to thank you all for joining today our one month celebration of the most historic opening to a presidency in American history. No president comes close to what President Trump has achieved over just the last 30 days." pic.twitter.com/sJavBFdj3q
— CSPAN (@cspan) February 20, 2025
PALESTINIANS STAGE NUREMBERG RALLY PARADING THE BODIES OF FOUR JEWS THROUGH THE STREETS (ostensibly "Hostages Who Are Being Returned to Israel")
HAMAS staged a parade showcasing the coffins of the Bibas family, and many Gazans turned out to cheer the jihadists' "victory" in murdering Jewish women and babies. pic.twitter.com/UWq2EmIaDe
— Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) February 20, 2025
The macabre scene unfolded on Thursday morning as Hamas returned the bodies of four Israeli captives who were held for more than 500 days: Shiri Bibas, 32; her two children, 4-year-old Ariel and 9-month-old Kfir; and 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz. The caskets bore smiling pictures of those killed alongside messages listing their "date of arrest" as Oct. 7, 2023.
Hamas displayed the caskets on a makeshift stage in front of an anti-Semitic sign depicting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a bloodthirsty vampire snarling above a photo of the murdered captives. The sign included the caption, "The War Criminal Netanyahu & His Nazi Army Killed Them with Missiles from Zionist Warplanes." There is no evidence to date that supports the claim.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) dispatched one of its staffers to sit with a uniformed Hamas terrorist at a camouflage table and sign "paperwork." The committee then transported the bodies through the Gaza Strip as cheering crowds of onlookers celebrated, waving Palestinian flags and shouting "victory" in Arabic. Other videos show masked Hamas gunmen casually chatting with excited Gazans out on the streets.
The people of Gaza are enthusiastic and active supporters of Hamas and their bloodthirsty fanaticism, whose goal is clear: the destruction of the Jewish People. This is not passive support...these people store weapons, hold hostages, allow the building of tunnels underneath their neighborhoods(with convenient entrances inside their homes!), camouflage Hamas terror infrastructure in their hospitals and schools, and act in all respects like volunteers in the Hamas terror organization.
That makes them guilty. That makes them legitimate targets for military action. That Israel has not treated the population of Gaza as terrorists is a testament to the essential humanity of the country. The entire country is convulsed with the agony of the hostages, and no matter where people fall on the political spectrum, they feel the collective pain and sadness. Yet the armed forces still comport themselves with dignity and respect for their own rules of engagement, which have gotten many soldiers killed over the years.
Trump, After Watching Grisly Celebration of the Murders of Two Babies and Their Mom: "I Don't Want to See a Building Left Standing, I Want Them Wiped Out"π΄ Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia:
— π‘πΆπΌπ΅ ππ²πΏπ΄ ♛ ✡︎ (@NiohBerg) February 20, 2025
"What we saw today in Gaza is a disgrace to Islam, an act of blasphemy against Allah." pic.twitter.com/hPKi7T8QNN
They had kids get on stage to celebrate the corpses of the Bibas Family and Oded Lifshitz being paraded.
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) February 20, 2025
What kind of culture is this? pic.twitter.com/11U8YlPTTS
NPR, this morning, called the display “somber” and “more reserved” than previous turnovers.
— Emily Zanotti π¦ (@emzanotti) February 20, 2025
Might want to save some money and defund them, @elonmusk https://t.co/5xwelZGyO7
KASH PATEL IS THE NEW FBI DIRECTOR!!!
If they didn’t steal it in 2020, they would’ve had 4 years of Trump being hamstrung by a Democrat Congress and Chris Wray as FBI Director
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) February 20, 2025
Now they get 4 years of Kash
And it’s going to be hell on earth for the Deep State
Congratulations to America’s new FBI Director pic.twitter.com/w5KtGpdMjx
Christianity Today CEO Denies Left-Wing Funding and Bias
TIMOTHY DALYRIMPLE: Last week, rumor spread on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that Christianity Today had received government funding in 2023. News influencers who have long been critical of us amplified these claims. In its extreme form, they claimed we had received $9 million in grants from USAID and were therefore “on the Biden payroll.”
The hysteria around USAID is having catastrophic consequences not only for Christian ministries doing lifesaving work around the world but more importantly for the poor and vulnerable people they serve. A careful conversation around whether and when ministries should partner with government agencies, and where corruption might be weeded out, is wise. Throwing those ministries and people into the flames and dancing around the bonfire is not.
Here Christianity Today goes again with its panties in a wad because of the USAID cuts. The Bible doesn’t call for governments to fund ministries, and Dalrymple ought to know that. Then again, if he acknowledges that truth, it takes away his opportunities to virtue signal.
Speaking of virtue-signaling, Dalrymple also tackled the notion of Christianity Today’s leftward bias from atop his high horse. His thesis is that because leftists occasionally don’t like the magazine’s content, we should dismiss the leftward drift that the magazine has been on for years. He also wants us to believe that because the magazine rebuffed some Biden administration propaganda, we should just ignore the rest of the magazine’s leftism.
“Some of our critics might be surprised to learn (though they should not be) that we declined to publish a piece by then-president Joe Biden in 2021 because we found it too political,” he wrote. “We also declined to conduct an interview with President Biden amid the 2024 campaign because it would have felt imbalanced to do so for one candidate and not another. These are not the actions of an organization beholden to the Biden administration.”
Forgive me if I sound jaded here, but I can’t help but think that Christianity Today’s editors just didn’t want to have to interview Donald Trump, too.
Okay, so Christianity Today didn’t directly receive USAID funding, but editor-in-chief Russell Moore has benefited from the largesse of USAID and left-wing foundations, and he has been clear about his never-Trumpism as well as his disdain for conservatism that doesn’t fit within his ideological bubble.
Moore is one of the creators of the anti-Trump After Party small group curriculum, which I wrote about last year. Moore hawked the After Party in Christianity Today newsletters and podcasts.
Last year, I wrote about how Moore and his After Party collaborators David French and Curtis Chang “have attacked Trump-supporting Christians repeatedly, and for all the talk of evangelicals making an idol out of Trump (which is a legitimate problem), these three have bowed to the idol of ‘Never Trump’ for years. Chang even blamed the ‘American church’ for the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.”
The After Party folks couldn’t acquire funding from traditional Christian publishers or organizations, so they reached left to shake the money tree. The Rockefeller Foundation ponied up from the same fund that it uses to donate to “climate justice” and gay rights causes, and foundations with ties to BLM and abortion helped fund the After Party as well.
But one of the biggest names funding the After Party is Trump Derangement Syndrome Patient Zero himself: Bill Kristol. Megan Basham notes that Kristol’s Defending Democracy Together, a “highly partisan, anti-Trump political group,” helped finance the After Party. Defending Democracy Together indirectly received USAID funds.
Basham also writes that “Dalrymple also does not clearly address the nature of the $7 million in grants that Christianity Today has received from the Lilly endowment (of Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fame), $5 mil of which has stated purpose of more global and diversity minded coverage.” Does that strike you as nonpartisan or balanced?
VIDEO: Denver City Council member discusses using tax dollars to raise the budget for a legal defense fund to protect criminal illegal aliens
Denver City Council member discusses using tax dollars to raise the budget for a legal defense fund to protect criminal illegal aliens pic.twitter.com/yte5gGUFgb
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 19, 2025
Thursday, February 20, 2025
CIRCLE-JERKING AT THE FEEDING TROUGH
"Texas State Rep. James Talarico is employed by Maya Consulting"
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) February 20, 2025
Maya: "We are a team of consultants who support school districts"
"$1,503,573.75 was paid by districts to Maya Consulting" https://t.co/PJ6jQh1KjH
It turns out the Bibas family was murdered
The Hamas terrorist organization on Thursday released the remains of four Israeli hostages it murdered following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.It's absolutely obscene, and just compounds why these Islamic monsters cannot remain in the area. Condolences to the Bibas family for the tragedy that took place.
The bodies handed over in a ghoulish Gaza ceremony were said to be of Shiri Bibas and her two children, Ariel and Kfir, as well as Oded Lifshitz, who was 83 when he was snatched.
The remains were in black coffins and as a final insult, the caskets were locked and presented without a key — offered only after they were paraded before a delirious crowd across the streets of Gaza, according to the NY Post.
Kfir, who was nine months old when he was taken, was the youngest captive. [...]
“Our hearts — the hearts of an entire nation — lie in tatters,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in a statement.
“On behalf of the State of Israel, I bow my head and ask for forgiveness. Forgiveness for not protecting you on that terrible day. Forgiveness for not bringing you home safely.”
AP reports the terrorists displayed the four black coffins on a stage in the Gaza Strip surrounded by banners, including a large one depicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire.
UK: Cops threatened survivor of Muslim rape gangs who spoke out on TV, tried to intimidate her into silence
This is what happens when a survivor of muslim rape gangs speaks out on the TV. Scandalous.π‘ pic.twitter.com/2XGgm6NdNT
— Patriots Of Britain (@HoodedClaw1974) February 17, 2025
What Does Musk Think He's Doing With That There DOGE Thing-a-majig?
I did not write this. It was sent to me by a friend, said it was emailed to him by a friend. I think it is a good summation of Elon Musk and DOGE.
President Trump has put Elon Musk in charge of something called the Department of Government Efficiency (aka: DOGE). For important but boring legal reasons, that "department" is actually just a rebranded and mission-updated executive organization first created by Obama and funded by Congress for IT work on the Obamacare website. They have read-only access to government spending data and other databases and can make recommendations to President Trump (which he often follows-through on). This "department" has been tasked by the President with identifying areas of waste, fraud, and abuse. You can follow the recommended cuts and changes which President Trump has implemented via their website doge.gov or by reading their X account (@doge). --So what's Musk doing and why are people so upset? I generally attribute the upset to one of two reasons. 1) POLITICAL: The spending cuts are impacting various organizations which give lavishly to various politicians. The nature of this giving varies. Sometimes the organization donates directly or indirectly (via their members), but often times they are important for getting out the vote for a politician, ensuring their re-election. Sometimes, these organizations are home to critical allies of the politicians and provide the politicians with channels to reward their friends via grants, government contracts, etc. Sometimes, these organizations provide the politician with certain regulatory powers they might desire for direct or indirect control over some person or company. For more on what that looks like, I encourage you to read the Twitter files or listen to recent interviews with Marc Andreessen or Mark Zuckerberg. When these organizations are stripped of their funding, they either lose power or they collapse altogether. For some number of people, the outcry is an antibody response to the attack on the organs of their power and influence. 2) TACTICAL: Elon Musk is running a playbook. That playbook involves moving extremely fast, creating a sense of urgency, and sometimes intentionally pausing all operations to see what emerges. Walter Isaacson wrote the definitive biography on Elon Musk. In it, he details several instances of Musk creating a "maniacal sense of urgency" in order to accelerate timelines and achieve what many initially believe to be impossible goals. He does this by "creating self-imposed crises" which he has determined causes teams to become hyper-focused and capable of making rapid decisions without losing momentum. If you're wondering how the U.S. launched an average of 20 rockets per year from 1970-2018 and now, thanks to Space X, launched 134 rockets in 2024 alone, it was arguably Musk's ability to instill urgency and drive people to achieve impossible goals that made this possible. Musk is applying that same sense of urgency to his team at DOGE. I speculate this is for two reasons. First, he sees America teetering on the brink of a debt spiral and believes that part of the remedy for this is to cut spending as quickly as possible to avoid this calamity. For perspective, if the government spent at the same level it did in 2019 while taking in the same tax revenues they did in 2024, they'd have an annual surplus they could use to pay down our debt. So Musk isn't crazy to think that making cuts is an important part of the equation to avoiding a crisis. Second, he knows the quickest way to break through gridlock and systemic failure is to put the system under duress thereby compelling people to take decisive action. Some percentage of bureaucrats were too comfortable doing too little. Some percentage intentionally did too little in order to undermine political actions they ideologically disagreed with (keep in mind, 93% of people in DC voted for Kamala). Newton's first law of inertia applies physically and well as psychically: unless substantial external force is applied, people will keep doing what they were doing before. In-addition to creating urgency, Musk is running another playbook. That playbook: "turn it off and target those who cry the loudest." In a recent podcast interview, Musk shared a story from his time at PayPal. He explained that when something went wrong with one of their payments systems, the fraudsters were always the fastest to contact support and they were also the most indignant. He saw this lesson replayed at Twitter. Shortly after acquiring the company, he paused all company credit cards thus stopping all payments to the vendors the company worked with. The vendors who called quickest and were angriest were often ones who had sold some sort of software solution to Twitter that the company *wasn't even using.* These vendors were getting money from Twitter without providing any value. Twitter money was a gravy train. The point about fraudsters being indignant is especially noteworthy today given the headlines. In the interview, Musk stated that normal people respond to a problem relatively calmly, "hey, this didn't work and I'm trying to figure out what's wrong." Fraudsters, by contrast, would be angry and threatening. Why? Motives varied but broadly they were afraid of being found out and were using aggression as a way to intimidate people into restoring things to the way they were. Sound familiar? It is for this reason that Musk asked President Trump to pause all funding flowing from the Executive Branch. As soon as they did this, they identified that the most indignation was coming from USAID. "So that became our target," Musk stated in a recent interview. Fast forward to today and the DOGE website and X feed show story after story of USAID contracts that wouldn't come anywhere close to having popular support were they democratically voted on. Per usdebtclock.org, DOGE has saved the government $114 billion so far and counting. --One rule that Musk often applies within his companies: "Delete as much as you can. If you don't restore 10% of what you deleted, you didn't delete enough." In his biography and also in many interviews you can find online, Musk has explained this principle saying, "Often times, engineers optimize for something that is later removed altogether. It's the greatest downfall of engineers: optimizing things that shouldn't exist." Tesla arguably has the most advanced autonomous driving platform in the world. In 2016, this platform was powered by 300,000 lines of C++ code. Thanks in no small part to Musk's policy on deletion, in 2023 Tesla reduced the total lines of code to 3,000. This substantial code reduction was achieved while *improving* the accuracy of Tesla's self-driving technology. In 2016, Tesla reported their cars averaged 3 miles of autonomous driving before drivers intervened. In 2023, their cars averaged 12 miles of autonomous driving before drivers intervened. This proven approach is what Musk is applying to federal regulations and spending. Just in the last week, DOGE found $1.9 billion in HUD funds that were *misappropriated* to a program that no longer existed. The improper appropriation was deleted and the money was returned to the U.S. Treasury. --Some quick replies to common refrains against Musk:"Musk is really dumb." - The guy taught himself how to build rockets, then built them, and then built massive chopsticks to softly pluck them from the sky for reuse. Do you think he's smarter or dumber than your congressperson or senator? "Musk is greedy." - Musk is worth $100B but lives relatively modestly and has put his entire fortune on the line many times so he can achieve goals like accelerating the world's transition to clean energy or making human life multi planetary so as to prevent the light of consciousness from being obliterated by an astroid. "Musk is self-interested." - While his peer group of billionaires travel the world in mega yachts and build island bunkers for self-preservation, Musk is sleeping on a cot in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building combing through mountains of poorly maintained databases / government spreadsheets with a group of young super nerds in order to save you and me hundreds, thousands, if not tens of thousands of our money from going to waste. Show me the "self-interest" in that."Musk is 'some billionaire.'" - He's not some billionaire. He's the world's most capable industrialist and arguably the most qualified person on earth to do exactly what he's doing. "Musk is unvetted." - Musk has had a Top Secret clearance for years now. His company, SpaceX is subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Why? Because those rockets are weapons-grade technology theoretically capable of carrying nuclear payloads. In terms of vetting, clearances, and access, Musk ranks in the same class of people as very senior elected officials and very senior members of the military. He's vetted. The government has a line of sight on everything he's connected to. "Nobody elected Elon Musk..." - Everyone I know of who voted for Trump voted for him knowing that he was going to put Elon Musk in charge of doing exactly what he's doing. Trump essentially ran a "coalition government" platform composed of many high-profile team members who were Democrats as recently as the Obama administration and some as recently as the Biden administration. Every Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, and Independent that voted for Trump knew that Elon was part of the package.
BREAKING: DOGE Reveals Biden EPA Awarded $2 Billion to Firm Linked to Election Denier Stacey Abrams in “Gold Bar” Heist – Lee Zeldin Responds
π¨Stacey Abrams’ Power Forward Communities received $2 BILLION to be a pass through entity for Biden EPA’s $20 billion “gold bar” scheme.
— Lee Zeldin (@epaleezeldin) February 20, 2025
They reported just $100 in total revenue after their founding in late 2023.
h/t @FreeBeacon
Elon Musk’s DOGE discovered that Joe Biden’s EPA awarded $2 billion to a firm linked to failed Democrat Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
Even worse, the firm only reported $100 in revenue in its first three months in business in 2023.
How did a brand new firm that only reported $100 in revenue get awarded $2 billion??
Earlier this month Lee Zeldin, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), provided an update to the money wasted on Biden’s watch in response to undercover video posted by Project Veritas in December.
EPA Advisor Brent Efron admitted on undercover video to an ‘insurance policy’ against the Trump Admin and said the agency was funneling billions to climate organizations in a last minute heist.
“We’re throwing gold bars off the Titanic,” Efron told a Project Veritas undercover journalist.
Last week Lee Zeldin said his team at the EPA ‘found the gold bars.’
“Fortunately, my awesome team at the EPA has found the gold bars. Shockingly, roughly $20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA. This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history and it was purposely designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight,” Zeldin said.
It gets worse.
Zeldin said the $20 billion was “awarded to just 8 entities that were then responsible for doling out your money to NGOs and others at their discretion with far less transparency. Just under $7 billion was sent to one entity called the Climate United Fund.”
Now this…