The Stakes

Why 2024 matters, and why you might sound like a crazy person if you complain about what the left is actually doing.

Note: This is a more partisan post than I usually write. I prefer sticking to policy, without much comment on politics for my essays. But in this election, many policies are closely linked to political power, and the specific worldview of the candidates. It’s impossible to confront incompetent policy without picking a side. There are of course some good (and bad) arguments against either candidate; I have smart friends voting on each side of the election, and respect disagreement!

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Imagine your child told you that the school principal had grabbed a student by her pigtails and performed an Olympic hammer throw with the girl; grabbed another student and thrown him in a closet with nails sticking out of the walls; and made another eat cake until he lost consciousness. Would you believe them, or chalk it up to a fanciful imagination?

Having recently read Matilda with my young daughters, the case of “The Trunchbull” got me thinking. At times, when I try to explain the radical schemes and insane spending of the US government with President Biden and VP Harris in charge, friends on the left look at me in disbelief. “That can’t be right” is a common refrain. To them, I sound like a raving lunatic.

They’ve simply never heard about the fortune allocated to “charities” to settle millions of migrants in American swing-state communities in the middle of the night; or the millions doled out to people who were denied civil service jobs for being unable to perform basic arithmetic; or the immense sums given to NGOs (non-government organizations) to literally subvert the First Amendment and Bill of Rights by censoring Americans; or the total corruption of dozens of government programs by extremist race and gender priorities; or the use of taxpayer money to run massive ballot harvesting operations on behalf of one party.

Only a radical right-wing partisan would believe that they’re doing all this, even when they brag about it. Right?

That’s just a start. Listing everything the Biden-Harris Administration has funneled billions of dollars towards, all the people they’ve greenlit for persecution, all the times they lied about it… You’d sound crazy to someone who doesn’t follow it closely. You’d sound like the kids in the Trunchbull's school complaining about being put in the “chokey” — fanciful! 

So, let's review some of the less-commonly-known things they’ve done, and why many of us hope to see Kamala Harris and her allies booted from Washington in January 2025. At the end, you can decide whether we’re the insane ones for noticing all this stuff, or if they’re the insane ones for actually doing it.  

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At the center of nearly every crazy thing that Harris and Biden have funded are NGOs. For a government looking to evade accountability, NGOs are a perfect partner: they’re less transparent and less restrained by the Bill of Rights. They can provide lucrative jobs to activists and former politicians. 

Harris and Biden, after allowing in over 10 million illegal migrants, have funneled billions to such “charitable” NGOs oriented specifically to coaching migrants how to pretend they need asylum, and helping illegal migrants stay in the US indefinitely and become citizens — skipping the line over people immigrating legally. Bribing and coaching migrants to claim asylum is one thing: a huge number of criminals and even men on the terrorist watchlist have been caught crossing illegally and then allowed into the country! 

Border NGOs are just one category. Many NGOs are awarded hundreds of millions at a time. Total NGO awards exceed $100 billion annually. That’s enough money to cause serious chaos. 

Another example: MENAACTION, a Middle East NGO, received $573,000 from the State Department to train Jordanian journalists to identify “fake news.” It turned out that the organization was itself promulgating fake news, pushing false claims accusing Israel of striking a Gaza hospital (a Palestinian missile had hit the hospital). There are thousands of others like this.

The NGO complex gets worse. If Congress can make no law abridging the freedom of speech, why not just outsource the censorship to people outside the government? The UK NGO “Center for Countering Digital Hate” has been plotting to “kill Musk’s Twitter” (their words) — and meeting with the Harris campaign. Matt Taibbi reported that activists connected to the CCDH have been advising the Harris campaign on election strategy at the same time the organization seeks to destroy a free speech platform in the US.

Many NGOs were funded as part of this administration’s work on censorship, domestically and globally. They claim they are fighting hate speech, but their actions are against the spirit of the US Constitution. Any power you give to the government, you should imagine your enemy using it against you: clearly, it’s not safe to let politicians or bureaucrats decide what is hate speech and what isn’t, which is why the 1st amendment bans the government from censoring it.

Where money cannot be directly appropriated for crooked NGOs, Harris and her allies often fund them via a scheme in which third parties get a cut of settlement money. Harris’ brother-in-law Tony West, of whom Vanity Fair quoted a campaign insider as saying, “There’s nothing that happens in the campaign that he’s not part of,” pioneered this model when he was assistant attorney general in the Obama years. These third party settlement payments have totaled into the tens of billions, including billions for teacher unions, environmental NGOs, and more, often run by close progressive allies.

The Trump administration stopped this practice of giving settlement money to NGOs; Biden resumed it. Do you think a President Harris would turn off the spigot for their friends in the “nonprofit” world - whether for trans, environmental, homeless, or censorship issues? I don’t. But hundreds of billions to unaccountable far-left activists isn’t enough for them. Unfortunately, the graft extends beyond NGOs and into the corporate world, where political bias has corrupted decisions that would otherwise be easy.

At the federal level, Harris and Biden’s FCC doled out $42 billion on “rural broadband,” contracts. Not a single person has been connected. After Elon spoke out against the administration, SpaceX lost the contract, despite Starlink’s ascendance and affordability (Starlink requires no additional infrastructure; the government could buy terminals easily, and setup takes five minutes). If there’s no goals or accountability, why not spend just $100 billion to connect nobody? $200 billion? Harris’ VP nominee Tim Walz bragged that with $52 million in Minnesota taxpayer dollars, he’d connect 7,500 homes and businesses to broadband internet. That’s a cost of nearly $7,000 per location. Starlink costs less than $1,000 to set up and run.

Why would he brag about spending more money than necessary? They seem to actually embrace the waste, and lack of results — as long as they can virtue signal about the alleged intention of the boondoggle. In a similar episode, VP Harris led the charge to electrify school buses in America — with $5 billion in federal money. After three years, only 7% of school districts that started the program have switched to electric buses. Others have withdrawn from the program. It was a failure. 

Harris also wants to spend your money helping convicted murderers and rapists (as well as the illegals she welcomed) undergo “gender transition.”  It sounds crazy, right? How could that be a real policy proposal… CNN reports: Harris “supported taxpayer funding of gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners.” 

If lighting those hundreds of billions on fire wasn’t enough, VP Harris has a plan to vacuum up even more: including by taxing “unrealized capital gains” (income that does not exist) . The vast majority of economists and economy-watchers realize that this wealth confiscation plan would be a disaster. It’s so extreme that even Mark Cuban, one of her top entrepreneurial surrogates, denounced the idea. NBC News reported:

Cuban assured the audience that Harris wouldn’t tax unrealized gains.

“I’m glad you asked that. So some people think that there’s going to be an unrealized gains tax on capital gains,” said Cuban, adding: “There is not, there is not.”

In August, Harris endorsed tax increases proposed by President Joe Biden in his fiscal year 2025 budget. One of the proposals is a 25% minimum tax on total income exceeding $100 million, including so-called “unrealized gains,” or growth in assets that haven’t been sold.

Here, one is told to disbelieve our own eyes and ears. Joe: You’re the crazy one for hearing what she said, for reading her proposals, and for seeing what she’s done!

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In the past, I might have assumed that any and all of these attacks on the left would be from a radical on my side. Any one of these things is bizarre enough to make one wonder: is a source missing context, or lying? But no. Again and again and again. This is what happens when one side abandons competence in favor of virtue-signaling. Things go off the rails. It’s why so many smart people who are builders are embracing, for the first time, the right and, yes, Donald Trump — people who were “Clinton Democrats” (Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Bill Ackman, to name a few). 

What did they see? 

Maybe it was that Elon Musk and SpaceX had built the largest rocket and flying object in human history, and the Department of Justice sued him for not hiring enough migrants, or fined and delayed him for things like dumping potable (drinkable) water without a permit in a place that gets a lot of rain anyway. Maybe it was when they saw, up close, the nationwide network of bureaucrats and activists that have wrought chaos in the cities where they do business. 

Maybe they clearly saw the push to destroy merit: in their medical schools (see UCLA), in the army, in the US Secret Service, everywhere. The urge to eliminate honors classes, and to punish achievement. 

They saw people setting our money on fire. Trying to turn off the lights in America to reduce carbon emissions. To settle tens of millions of uneducated illegal migrants in American communities, flying under cover of night [literally!], and give them handouts, to alter the electoral map.

Perhaps so many of our friends, formerly on the moderate left, saw the actions of the people being bankrolled by this leftist patronage network: the people who are throwing cans of soup at works of art around the world, or the “pro-Palestine” protesters blocking bridges and intersections during rush hour, putting working people and other commuters in jeopardy. 

The first Trump administration was far from perfect. But he reduced the regulatory burden, got onshoring going, grew real wages, achieved peace deals in the Middle East and prevented new wars. Many bureaucrats in the “deep state” and some generals who opposed him tried to defy him constantly, and he stood up to them; it’s no surprise they are attacking him now. But again, that is not to say he is perfect.

The question in an election is binary. We can go through a list of the personal flaws of both candidates and the people around them. But policy is what really matters this election: hundreds of billions of grift, the concept of merit, illegal immigration and safety, and weaponization of the bureaucracy are on the line. Judicial appointments are on the line. Will we have originalist judges who go back to the US Constitution, or activists? And so much more…

US society can advance forward, or it can retreat into this pervasive cronyism that echoes the kludge and zero-sum nonsense that kept the West mired in poverty throughout the Middle Ages. We can advance up into the stars, or down into the bureaucratic morass of unassailable grift.

If there’s any chance whatsoever of turning off the nonsense and corruption, it’s by voting out the left — and joining Elon Musk and other bold leaders from the competent parts of our society who’ve stepped forward to save the day. Our civilization is on the verge of a golden age, but only if it can escape the swamp. This is why we and so many are helping Trump win, and planning to help in government if and when he does.