Note: Most Thursdays, I take readers on a deep dive into a topic I hope you'll find interesting, important, or at least amusing in its absurdity. These essays are made possible by — and are exclusive to — our VIP supporters. If you'd like to join us, take advantage of this 25% off VODKAPUNDIT promo code.
"When the American people finally figure out just how badly we've been ripped off, we're going to be angry, and there will be hell to pay."
I'm here to tell you today that I was wrong — well, I was one-third wrong.
While I had a better idea than most just how much money (and worse, how much talent and innovation) was being wasted, the scale of graft and corruption just at USAID came as a bit of a surprise. But it isn't like I was off by an order of magnitude or anything that serious, so I'm chalking that one up as a W on the "Advantage: VodkaPundit" scoreboard.
There will also be hell to pay. The Left is beginning to pay right now, as the $50 billion-plus USAID slush fund dries up. They're doing what they can to stop Elon Musk and his whiz-kid DOGE boys, but their efforts so far have amounted to zilch, without even a side of nada.
Watching the Left flail around as DOGE confiscates their iron rice bowls is more fun than some impossible hybrid of Gladiator, Star Wars, and the Keystone Kops.
"ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?"
Who could forget earlier this week when social media maven and part-time congresscritter Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed the shocking truth about Musk's intelligence?
"This dude," eh?
Then there was Congresscritter Jasmine Crockett (D-On Your Ass) who all but threatened violence because that's "what democracy looks like."
[language warning]
Social media grifter "Brooklyn Dad" approved because, of course, he did.
Maybe you've seen the online videos of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-Weber) trying to work up a protest rally chant last weekend. He did his best — not much, given his negative charisma rating — but it's difficult to get people all worked up in this circumstance. Schumer wasn't leading a rally to restore civil rights to some oppressed minority but to keep the gravy train chugging straight along into his and his buddy's well-lined pockets.
[language warning]
Dem pol: "What do we want?"
Dem masses: "Unaccountable taxpayer money for your cronies and otherwise unemployable midwits from the credentialed class!"
Dem pol: "When do we want it?"
Dem masses: [begin murmuring amongst themselves about whether they're at the correct protest]
The Dems aren't sending their best, are they? Or maybe the Screechy Female/Septugenairan Male Axis is as deep (as derp?) as their bench goes.
And pardon my language here but why, as NotraChavez asked when posting that Schumer video, would Democrats believe their own lame bulls**t? The whole reason they take your money to feather their nests is because nobody believes the Left's lame bulls**t. If people believed in it, Lefties wouldn't have to fund it in secret and enforce it with Big Government's iron fist.
If you missed the piece I wrote Wednesday on that topic, I'm afraid it's aged like an albino in a maximum-strength tanning bed. It isn't that the column wasn't any good or the numbers were incorrect. It's that we're learning so much more every day, every hour, about how our money was taken and given to anti-American people and causes that all the numbers I quoted have since been superseded by even bigger numbers.
When I wrote the column, it was an established fact that the U.S. government had paid $8 million in "fees" to Politico for their "Pro" service. NASA alone paid more than half a million dollars — and for what? For duplicative Pro subscriptions, estimated to cost between $7,000 and $15,000 apiece. If those aren't backdoor subsidies to a lefty news outlet, then what are they?
Before the virtual ink had a chance to dry on my column, we learned that the actual total to Politico Pro was over $34 million. But even that number is hours old and perhaps subject to increase. That's $34 million spent, as someone on X put it, for progressive bureaucrats to read what progressive reporters had spoken about with other progressive bureaucrats.
I was today years old when I learned that USAID — that's your and my tax dollars, gentle reader — financed 8% of the budget for the super-lefty British Broadcasting Corporation. What, the Brits can't afford to pay for their own BBC agitprop any longer? It wouldn't surprise me, frankly.
Speaking of YOLO/WTF grants, here's a list of nearly half a billion dollars that went out to... [insert shrug emoji]:
Thayer also noted that "USAID sent $4.2 billion in total grants to 'Miscellaneous foreign awardees' under Biden alone." while most of the ones on that list "at least have descriptions (unlike those above), and sometimes they even have countries named, but no names or addresses."
At a time when our Navy has too few ships and too few properly trained sailors, that same $4.2 billion in mystery money could have built two brand-new, state-of-the-art Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers — with enough cash left over to pay for the fuel and sailors to operate them for a full year.
This. Is. Madness.
None of these attacks on USAID and the State Department's largess mean that Americans are cold-hearted isolationists. We do care about the rest of the world, and we do like to help when we can. But when we learn that out of the $4 billion we sent in aid to Haiti, only 2% went to helping Haitians and "the rest went to firms in DC and 'other'," then it is our right and our duty to demand that the madness stop.
I enjoy a warm feeling when I see a starving Haitian with a plateful of food provided by a few cents out of my taxes. But when I learn that those few cents came with a big payday for Washington insiders, then my populist anger has me wondering if I should double up on my blood pressure meds.
Most corrosive to our social fabric and civic institutions is that mystery money going to overseas mystery organizations or individuals is not anyone's idea of a (small-r) republican government. It certainly isn't what the Founders had in mind.
The rot is bipartisan, I probably don't have to remind anyone.
Here's a flashback for you. Remember when Mitt Romney tapped Paul Ryan as his running mate in 2012 to secure his right flank with conservative voters who weren't exactly sold on Romney's conservative cred? (And with even better reason than we knew at the time.) Then do you remember when Ryan went on to become House Speaker under Trump 45, promising to have one conservative piece of legislation after another ready to go "like jets lined up for takeoff?" Remember when pretty much none of that happened, and Ryan went on to prove himself just as squishy as Romney ever was?
Yeah, check out the well-feathered retirement bed he made for his former staffers:
"The vast majority of their expenses are right in the salaries. So, yeah, retirement home," Data Republican (small-r) added. While DR admitted that it's still "unclear" where most of the Ryan organization's money is coming from, it's crystal clear that even being an ex-staffer for a failed and short-lived "conservative" House Speaker comes with what amounts to a lifetime sinecure.
$276,000 a year to be Ryan's ex? Does Mrs. Ryan know about that deal?
If there isn't public money somehow involved in providing part-time (if that) work at salaries that the vast majority of Americans can only dream of, I'd be shocked.
Meanwhile, the Biden Cabal weaponized the IRS to go after your PayPal and Venmo if they hit $600 a year.
What I got wrong was the anger. Certainly, we're all doing our best Howard Beale and shouting, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take this anymore!" But, at least in my case, I'm doing it virtually and semi-ironically.
Because what I got wrong... what I never imagined... was how much fun this would be.
John Maynard Keynes, the British economist whose name is a dirty word in my house, devised the concept of "animal spirits" in his 1936 book, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money." As much as I despise Keynes for weaponizing economic downturns against free markets, he was on the money (heh) with animal spirits. I asked ChatGPT to sum up the concept for me, and it performed well:
Keynes argued that economic decisions are not always driven by pure rationality or mathematical calculations. Instead, confidence, optimism, fear, and uncertainty influence how businesses and individuals behave in markets. He described animal spirits as the spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction.
That's what we're feeling these days. Trump brings the "winning" energy to almost everything he touches, even when he's losing. Then there's Musk, whose endless energy has worked to remake the launch industry, social media, and electric vehicles. It is no exaggeration to say that the man whose adult life has been aimed like an arrow at colonizing Mars has too much energy for one planet.
That animal spirit is, as Keynes wrote almost a century ago, infectious.
You can see it on X, where volunteers like Data Republican and her tech partner-in-thoughtcrime, Cory Watilo, are building government spending databases in their spare time, seemingly for grins and giggles. You can see it right here at PJ Media, where my colleagues turn in one story after another geared to make you smile.
An X user going by KG put it better than anyone else I've found so far. "The American people endured a century-long psychological operation meant to turn them into leftist cattle," he posted on Wednesday, "and broke through an election system rigged from top to bottom against them to elect the most right-wing leader in Modern history."
"The impossible is what Americans do best."
Indeed. My fellow Americans make me glow with pride sometimes.
On the other side of the virtual aisle, the Left's animal spirits are consumed by fear, uncertainty, and anger. Just watch:
Last night, it was a USAID employee blabbing to ABC about yanking pride flags- tonight it's NBC featuring a federal employee crying about having to explain himself to DOGE employees, explaining to loud gasps that the DOGE supervisor lives onsite with his family: pic.twitter.com/ENaPkSxM3v
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) February 5, 2025
Granted, we're just getting started. There will be setbacks. There very well could be violence. DOGE aims to cut [dr_evil_voice] ONE TRILLION DOLLARS [/dr_evil_voice] out of the federal budget this year alone. It may well be impossible to confiscate that many iron rice bowls without eliciting a violent response.
Should the worst come to pass, remember Trump last summer — bloodied, defiant, fist raised in the air, and shouting, "FIGHT!"
My Previous VIP Essay: Now Is the Time for Peace
