Going against the wealthy.

In yesterday’s column discussing the escalating Alinskyite war by the American Left against Elon Musk, I referenced an interview the industrialist, tech tycoon, and scourer of America’s broken federal fisc gave with Larry Kudlow at Fox Business on Monday. That interview is worth watching in full if you haven’t seen it… It’s important to recognize that Musk’s discussion of DOGE’s efforts at stripping out all of the obvious waste are closely related to this rather untoward moment from a week ago… Green’s complaint, the one that motivated him to brandish his walking stick at the president of the United States, was, as he later said, that Donald Trump has “no mandate to cut Medicaid.” (RELATED: The Best Predictor of Brat Behavior in Congress) But Trump isn’t trying to cut Medicaid — at least not in terms of cutting the volume or quality of the service it provides to its honest recipients. Nor is Trump trying to cut Social Security. The White House did what it could in a press release Tuesday to make that clear… The Trump Administration will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits. President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again). Elon Musk didn’t say that, either. Fake Sherman is lying again. Here is Musk’s direct quote: “The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — which is most of the federal spending is entitlements — so, that’s, like, the big one to eliminate. That’s the, sort of half-trillion, maybe $6-700 billion a year.” And he’s exactly right. FACT: The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates taxpayers lose as much as $521 billion annually to fraud — and most of that is within entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid. FACT: Over the past two decades, the federal government has made an estimated $2.7 trillion in “improper payments” — the majority of which come in the form of “payments to deceased individuals or those who no longer [are] eligible for government programs.” FACT: The Social Security Administration made an estimated $72 billion in improper payments between 2015 and 2022. FACT: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services estimated it made $140+ billion in improper payments in 2024 alone. What kind of a person doesn’t support eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending that ultimately costs taxpayers more? But don’t tell that to Elissa Slotkin, who “won” a close election over Mike Rogers in November for a Senate seat in Michigan and now is somehow a key Democrat spokeswoman… Musk said the quiet part out loud: he’s going after your Social Security and Medicare. Period. Mark my words. They will make you pay in every part of your life. pic.twitter.com/Hjv31xn58B — Sen. Elissa Slotkin (@SenatorSlotkin) March 11, 2025 And don’t tell it to Pete Buttigieg, who’ll apparently be running for Michigan’s other Senate seat (you might have thought he was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, before Joe Biden made him his make-believe transportation secretary, but geography is fungible for Democrats)… (RELATED: The ‘Peter Principle’ Targets Michigan) There were howls of protest and denial from the GOP any time we pointed out that Republicans want to cut Social Security. Now the most powerful official in the White House goes on TV and calls it “the big one to eliminate.”pic.twitter.com/hAtrnEoQQN — Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) March 11, 2025 It’s quite interesting, don’t you think? All of a sudden, the Democrats have this narrative that Musk’s efforts to identify and stop the waste not just in the administrative state but in the entitlement programs where most of the federal budget is spent constitutes “cuts.” On the surface, you’d see this and scratch your head. After all, the more waste, fraud, and abuse can be drained out of these programs, the easier it is to make them solvent, no? And given Social Security’s promise, which is that you pay into that program your whole working life and it guarantees you a retirement income so it’s more or less a forced savings regime for the American worker, you’d have to say that limiting payouts to cover only those people who legitimately belong in the system is a necessity. Right? Well, perhaps not. Every time Medicaid is audited at the state or federal level, it’s the same story — billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse. Everybody knows Medicaid is a pinata for scam artists and crooks. It’s not for nothing that Al Green, from the slums of south Houston, was the guy carrying on about “Medicaid cuts” — constituencies like his are generally rife with Medicaid fraudsters who set up shop as medical providers and file scads of Medicaid reimbursement forms in search of mailbox money from Uncle Sam. In certain communities where Democrats get near-unanimous voting majorities, Medicaid fraud qualifies as one of the most lucrative industries around. Medicare isn’t much better. And as Musk notes, there are millions and millions of Social Security numbers that remain active despite the people those numbers were attached to having assumed room temperature years, decades, or even centuries ago, and those active SSN’s are the petri dish from which illegal aliens might feed in order to claim things like Social Security disability payments. (RELATED: DOGE Confirms That Social Security Is a Fine Mess.) So while this might seem puzzling — trimming the fat from these programs is a means of shoring them up so that they won’t collapse, and how on earth could that possibly be politically divisive? On the surface, very little is what it seems among today’s Democrats. And it’s hilarious to see Slotkin accusing Musk of saying the quiet part out loud. Maybe if politics doesn’t work out, she can get a job at the Cineplex because her skills at projection are top-flight. It’s the Democrats who are saying the quiet part out loud. They’re all but admitting they draw no distinction between honest recipients of entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and the scammers and fraudsters and illegal aliens who are raking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the system. (RELATED: Insuring Illegals Takes Care from ‘Legals’) The cost of which, by the way, turns out to be many times those hundreds of billions. The waste, fraud, and abuse, which Musk estimates is somewhere on the order of 15 percent of all the money the government spends, is all deficit spending, and that means we’re borrowing money to throw it out of helicopters to satisfy the clients of the Buttigiegs, Slotkins and Greens of the world. With the interest on the national debt now coming to a trillion dollars a year, you can see the accumulated cost of all this. (RELATED: From GDP to Reality: Putting the $35 Trillion Debt Into Perspective) It’s ruinous. And none of these people can even be bothered to show any concern for it. Ironically, there’s a certain honesty — or clarity, if you prefer — in all of this. Today’s Democrat Party is a collection of people who believe that a parasitical existence at the government teat is an honorable and productive way of life. That’s something they’ve long sought to downplay. But clearly, that isn’t true anymore; now it’s out in the open. To them, no matter how you manage to get at government benefits, it’s fine. This ought to make seniors on Social Security or Medicare utterly furious. But to people in their 40s or 50s or below, who have long figured we’d get screwed over by Social Security’s insolvency just in time to not see the checks we’ve been paying for, it’s even worse than that. And this is a big reason why I say that the Democrats are a dead political party walking. You can’t be this contemptuous of the people you seek to govern and expect to be rewarded by us without a long, contemplative period in the wilderness. READ MORE from Scott McKay: We Always Knew It Was Going to Get Weird — As Elon Musk Can Tell You Five Quick Things: Our National Crazy Eurotrash Girlfriend Trump Now Stands Astride American Politics Like a Colossus The post Entitlement Fraud Is Now a Stated Aim of the Democrat Party appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

You can always rely on George Will to invoke the Munich analogy when urging the United States to become further embroiled in wars. The other day, the Washington Post’s favorite conservative columnist trotted out Munich to accuse President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of “appeasement” of Russia’s Vladimir Putin in relation to the Ukraine war. Will dragged out the ghost of Neville Chamberlain and compared Ukraine to Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. Putin is Hitler, of course, who Will says (quoting neoconservative Hal Brands) is waging a “quasi-genocidal war,” and Trump’s quest for a ceasefire to stop the killing is, Will writes, equivalent to Chamberlain’s boast of “peace for our time.” (RELATED: National Review Sides With the War Party Again) The analogy, of course, is false on its face. Munich involved Chamberlain and France’s leaders attempting to avoid war. The Munich moment for Ukraine, if there was one, came in early 2022, when Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border and Will’s favored presidential candidate in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, did nothing. Worse was to come. (RELATED: Biden’s Foreign Policy Was a Colossal Failure — From Ukraine to China) The administration that Will voted for responded to Russia’s invasion by sending Ukraine enough military and financial aid to continue the slaughter of Ukrainians and Russians but did little, if anything, to bring about a diplomatic end to the war. (RELATED: The Biden Trap) By the time Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians were casualties in a war neither side was winning. Trump’s goal is to end the fighting by negotiating a ceasefire and to stop a regional war from becoming a world war. That, Will writes, is a “spurious” realism, which he claims is paving the way to a wider war due to “U.S. leaders’ ignorance of history.” Ah, yes, history and Munich — the analogy Will reaches for again and again. In 1977, Will entitled a column “Israel and Munich,” wherein he compared America’s treatment of Israel in the mid-to-late 1970s with Britain’s treatment of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. In a June 13, 1996, column supporting the first round of NATO enlargement (which George Kennan called the most fateful error of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War world, and which 50 Russia and national security experts publicly opposed), Will invoked the Munich analogy, decried appeasement, and claimed that “what would be enlarged with NATO would be central Europe’s prospects for … deterrence and democracy.” A year before that, Will, in a series of columns, urged the Clinton administration and NATO to intervene in Bosnia, again invoking memories of World War II.  And Will originally supported the Afghan and Iraq wars, including nation-building efforts that led to the debacle of “endless wars,” only to later judge the Iraq war to be a historic blunder. Last year, Will criticized Republicans who voted against continuing to aid Ukraine by writing about the new “Axis” powers of Russia, China, and Iran who, “as in the 1930s, [are] watching” the West’s response. In a Feb. 1, 2025, column, Will, on the one hand, writes that Russia “is hardly an irresistible force,” but then warns that a Ukrainian collapse “presag[es] another war.” You get it — just like the collapse of Czechoslovakia presaged World War II. Perhaps Mark Episkopos was right when he argued that it was time to retire the Munich analogy. Its misuse has led to American foreign policy blunders from Vietnam to Iraq to Ukraine. History can be a great teacher, but its lessons should produce humility and prudence when applied to contemporary events. George Will’s self-touted “conservative sensibility” apparently missed that lesson. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Nixon–Mao, Trump–Putin, and Triangular Diplomacy National Review Sides With the War Party Again Liberals Supported Deals With Communists but Not With Putin NATO Firsters vs. Elbridge Colby The post George Will and Munich appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — Kudos to President Donald Trump’s administration for canceling $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” “Since Oct. 7, Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and antisemitic harassment on their campuses — only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon, also a member of Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, said in a Friday statement. A report by Columbia’s antisemitism task force addressed how toxic pro-Palestinian protests have polluted university life. One student, a university report noted, captured 750 antisemitic online posts written by Columbia students. With Trump in the White House, expect long overdue change. Over the weekend, ICE officials detained a Columbia University Apartheid Divest leader, Mahmoud Khalil, even though his lawyer told the Associated Press he has a green card and is a legal permanent resident. (RELATED: The Arrest of Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil: Unmasking Campus Radicalism) “Columbia Expelled Student Protesters for the First Time in Over 50 years. But Activists Won’t Back Down,” read a Friday headline in the Nation. “The last recorded expulsions for non-peaceful demonstrations were in 1968,” the Nation reported. Subsequent student sit-ins, takeovers, and blockades occurred “without (students) suffering the same disciplinary outcomes as those opposing Israel’s war on Gaza.” Like that’s a good thing. “Students have a right to protest in all settings, including academic ones, particularly when those protests center liberation movements and call for universities to divest from genocide and warmongers,” a spokesperson for CUAD told the Nation. According to a university website, Columbia’s undergraduate tuition is $71,150 — and yet this bastion of higher learning apparently teaches students that (a) there is little need to distinguish between peaceful and non-peaceful protests, (b) they have a right to break laws that apply to others, and (c) they are especially entitled to break laws if they are progressive. And where did students get that idea? Just maybe from the adults who taught them. Four students face expulsion, Barnard College President Laura Ann Rosenbury wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education, after they forced their way into a college building and left $30,000 in damage “to a building that houses not just the offices of the president and the dean of the college, but also multiple classrooms and the offices that seek to further diversity, equity, and inclusion at Barnard.” It makes you wonder if the students could read. Warning. This is what happens when academic big shots sell a college education as a protest opportunity. Education optional. (RELATED: Higher Education’s 7 Deadly Sins) “I think they should call the police immediately,” Steve McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, told me. Call it equal justice for social justice warriors. In my dreams, overly partisan professors see what they have done to higher learning and take up pottery. Then, college presidents hire professors who see their calling as instilling rigor and a lifelong love of learning, not coddling young adults with fad curricula. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. I’m not holding my breath. As McGuire observed, “How do you fix a problem when you can’t even see it?” READ MORE from Debra J. Saunders: Bhattacharya Did Not Follow the COVID Herd Trump Tells Zelenskyy He’s Gambling on World War III USAID v. Trump Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM The post Equal Justice for Social Justice Warriors appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

by James Howard Kunstler, All News Pipeline: “There’s a chance to restore democracy from the bureaucracy, but just a chance.” —Elon Musk CBS 60-Minutes’ Gaslighter-in-Chief Scott Pelley was at it again Sunday night trying to put over the story that Donald Trump had unfairly cashiered a broad swathe of federal agency Inspectors General — whose job it […]

by Martin Jay, Strategic Culture: The slaughter of civilians, mainly Alawites loyal to the former Syrian president Bashar al Assad, is a wake-up call for America and all eyes will now be on Trump as to see whether he supports heinous killing by HTS fighters – and therefore supports Netanyahu – or whether he sees […]

Chicago's Lyric Opera to host 'A Night Of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness' for seven nights in November