Sometimes you have to laugh. Earlier this week, Sen. Chuck Schumer threw his toys out of the stroller in a social media post. He wrote: “An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government.”
To the extent that this histrionic claim makes any sense we must guess that Schumer was talking about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Schumer seemed especially angry about the closure of USAID. He went on to grouse about Donald Trump and his “billionaire buddies.”
Happily for those of us who keep an eye on such things, Schumer’s rant was reposted by Alex Soros.
Not many readers will have heard of Alex Soros. But I can tell you this: he is not a man who got where he did simply by hard work.
Alex is the son of multi-billionaire investor and dark-money donor George Soros. He is also now engaged to former Hilary Clinton aide Huma Abedin (who, for some reason, ditched Anthony Wiener some time back).
Anyone who follows Soros Jr. on social media will have noticed that he gets some pretty amazing photo opportunities. One day he’s posting a photo of himself with Nancy Pelosi. Next he’s standing next to Chuck Schumer. Another day he’s with Kamala or Tim Walz (remember him?). Still another day he’s with Pete Buttigieg or Elizabeth Warren.
What a charmed life.
But why did all these people spend recent years shimmying up to Alex Soros? Is it the man’s charisma, brains, insight and originality? No, of course not. It’s because his father is a billionaire radical-left-wing investor, and so is he.
Everyone knew that it was pay-to-play with the Democrats. If you or I asked every member of the Democrat high command for a meeting, it’s unlikely we’d get one. But change your name to Soros and you might get a different result.
So it’s not like So it’s not like Schumer & co. care about non-elected people having any say in government. It’s just that they don’t like it — in fact they really hate it — when it isn’t their guys.
There is no other principle here. The Dems who object to the work of DOGE are just angry that for once it isn’t their side that’s calling the shots.
Take the shuttering of USAID. For the Dems, this was one of their agencies. One of those taxpayer-funded boondoggles that allowed Democrats to pursue and further their own interests. Not America’s interests. Their own interests. As bizarre as some of them were.
None of it came cheap. In the fiscal year 2023 USAID’s budget totaled some $40 billion. To put that in context, that is roughly the GDP of a small country like Estonia.
The agency was run like a small country too. Many years ago Samantha Power came to prominence for a book she wrote on genocide. She was against it — like most people — but the Democrats were in need of a person who could claim some moral heft. And so Samantha Power rose up the ranks and ended up as US Ambassador to the United Nations under Barack Obama. During which time she failed to prevent any genocides. But that is another matter.
In recent years, Power has been the head of USAID. And during that time she has enjoyed the lovely meeting place where radical left wing billionaire foundations and Democrat activist politics meet.
During her time as the head of USAID, Power had multiple meetings with the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and — of course — the Soros family’s Open Society Foundation.
This got passed off as an innocent little meeting of minds. Power claimed that she merely aimed to “Work with philanthropies and the private sector to catalyze resources to tackle these complex global challenges is important to improving the quality of life for people around the world.”
Because of course Power does a fine line in pre-2025 swamp gobbledygook.
But the agency which she presided over did things that have nothing to do with the US national interest.
It’s not just the $1.5 million for DEI in Serbia. Or the $2.5 million for electric vehicle charging stations in Vietnam. Nor is it merely the half a million dollars bunged to Indonesian coffee companies so that they could meet “gender goals.” Or even the millions of dollars sent to the Taliban to provide contraceptives and condoms. Although that one could be said to have its upsides.
It´s the fact that we now know that USAID and other wasteful departments were fixing and nixing things behind the scenes. Take the discovery that USAID was funneling millions of dollars every year to friendly media outlets like Politico.
It’s a neat trick that. You mute certain media that don’t favor you while essentially financing the media that do.
And of course the favor gets returned. Who did Power give her gracious, softball, exit-interview to when leaving USAID? Why Politico of course. There she boasted of how hard she had worked, warned the incoming administration about what they should do and claimed that USAID is “an agency that has thousands of people around the world representing the United States.”
But are they? Were they? The question really is — which vision of the United States did USAID represent?
You can tell a lot by what USAID had already decided to scrub from its website. As archived versions of it still show, USAID’s DEI strategy promised that the agency was committed “to improving and enhancing diversity throughout the Agency, enhancing inclusion and equity for everyone in the workplace, and strengthening accountability for promoting and sustaining a diverse workforce and an inclusive Agency culture.”
That isn’t representing the United States around the world. It is representing a narrow and now very dated view around the world. A view that has nothing to do with the founding principles or present priorities of this country.
If some of the Dems are unhappy with DOGE’s savings, perhaps they could simply note one thing. Not just what it’s like when the boot is on the other foot. But the fact that it was their ideologically-driven, mega-donor-pushed funding-splurge that made this necessary.
Source link
