#carlson king

[jacks-weird-world]

Family feud - part 4❄️

[thornescratch]

Throwback Thursday to the time the Caps went to a Lil Wayne and Drake concert together, and Nicke wore a hilariously ugly jacket.

[retrohockeyhell]

Wayne's postcard to Steve. (Image courtesy of the Steve Carlson's facebook page)

The fact that Steve Carlson roomed with Wayne Gretzky in his rookie (WHA) year is kind of amusing to me. Especially with the stories I have learnt about it.

Also apparently, Wayne left Steve notes on hotel stationery.

Gretzky's nickname was "Brinks" (because of his hefty signing bonus), Carlson's was "Hollywood" (because of his notorious role in the movie "Slapshot", which at the time, he wasn't all too thrilled with being associated with).

Since Wayne was a rather, let's say, "petite" forward, he often got caught in situations where older, bigger and more experienced players picked on him. (That boy was around 160 pounds and 5'11" at age 17, another one of his nicknames was "Pretzel" believe it or not.) He learned to weave in between players, using his small size to his advantage. As soon as Gretzky sensed someone approaching him, he would skate away, leaving his opponents wondering where the hell he has gone.

Interestingly enough, Steve Carlson, despite his reputation of being a "goon", was a finesse player, who avoided fights, and, as he mentions himself, was terrible at them. He often "turtled" most of the hits, bowing his head and covering himself with his arms, waiting for the assault to end. He was often benched because of his brothers' (Jack and Jeff's) infamous antics and the image which "Slap Shot" (1977) created for him.

They shared a season together (1978-79), with Gretzky continuing to play with the Oilers in NHL and Steve moving over to L.A. to Kings. Ironically, another team which Gretzky would be a part of in the future.

God I miss the violet gold Kings. Jesus Christ.

[sierradeaton]

seven days a week

[shitpostcharlie]

[wocko13]

was inspired by my friend (@/petalprizmz on twitter drop her a follow shes awesome!) to post art once a week just to keep active on my art accts and to get over that fear of posting "unfinished" art. gonna try my hardest to keep up with it so enjoy this dump!

[sidonius5]

𝒜 𝒻𝒾𝓁𝓂 𝒶𝒹𝒶𝓅𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝒻𝓇𝑜𝓂 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓃𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁 𝒷𝓎 𝐒𝐢𝐫 𝐇. 𝐑𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐇𝐚𝐠𝐠𝐚𝐫𝐝, 𝓚𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓢𝓸𝓵𝓸𝓶𝓸𝓷'𝓼 𝓜𝓲𝓷𝓮𝓼 𝒾𝓈 𝒶𝓃 𝒶𝒹𝓋𝑒𝓃𝓉𝓊𝓇𝑒 𝓉𝑜 𝓋𝒾𝑒𝓌. 𝗘𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗮𝗯𝗲𝘁𝗵 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝘁𝗶𝘀 𝒽𝒾𝓇𝑒𝓈 𝒶 𝓇𝑒𝓈𝒸𝓊𝑒 𝓅𝒶𝓇𝓉𝓎 𝓉𝑜 𝓈𝑒𝒶𝓇𝒸𝒽 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝒽𝑒𝓇 𝓂𝒾𝓈𝓈𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒽𝓊𝓈𝒷𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓉𝒽𝓇𝑜𝓊𝑔𝒽 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝑔𝓇𝑒𝒶𝓉 𝒸𝑜𝓃𝓉𝒾𝓃𝑒𝓃𝓉 𝑜𝒻 𝒜𝒻𝓇𝒾𝒸𝒶, 𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝒹𝒶𝓃𝑔𝑒𝓇𝓈 𝒻𝒾𝓁𝓁𝑒𝒹 𝓉𝒽𝓇𝑜𝓊𝑔𝒽 𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒹𝑒𝓈𝑒𝓇𝓉𝓈, 𝓈𝓌𝒶𝓂𝓅𝓈 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒿𝓊𝓃𝑔𝓁𝑒𝓈 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝑔𝓇𝑜𝓊𝓅 𝒸𝑜𝓂𝑒 𝒶𝒸𝓇𝑜𝓈𝓈. 𝒯𝒽𝒾𝓈 𝒻𝒾𝓁𝓂 𝓌𝒶𝓈 𝒶𝓃 𝑒𝓎𝑒 𝑜𝓅𝑒𝓃𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒿𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓃𝑒𝓎 𝑜𝒻 𝒜𝒻𝓇𝒾𝒸𝒶, 𝒷𝑒𝒶𝓊𝓉𝒾𝒻𝓊𝓁 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓌𝑜𝓃𝒹𝓇𝑜𝓊𝓈. 𝒯𝒽𝒾𝓈 𝓌𝒶𝓈 𝒶 𝓂𝑜𝓋𝒾𝑒 ℐ 𝓁𝑜𝓋𝑒𝒹 𝓉𝑜 𝓌𝒶𝓉𝒸𝒽 𝓌𝒽𝑒𝓃 ℐ 𝓌𝒶𝓈 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓃𝑔, 𝓈𝑜 𝓂𝓎 𝓂𝑜𝓂 𝒷𝓇𝑜𝓊𝑔𝒽𝓉 𝒶 𝒸𝑜𝓅𝓎 𝑜𝓃 𝒱ℋ𝒮 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓂𝑒 𝓉𝑜 𝓀𝑒𝑒𝓅. 𝒢𝓇𝑒𝒶𝓉 𝒻𝒾𝓁𝓂 𝓉𝑜 𝓌𝒶𝓉𝒸𝒽.

[demdelis]

[kwebtv]

Series Premiere

MacKenzie's Raiders - Night Raid - Syndication - October 1, 1958

Western

Running Time: 60 minutes

Written by Barney Slater

Produced by

Directed by Walter Doniger

Narrated by Art Gilmore

Stars:

Richard Carlson as Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie

Morris Ankrum as Sgt Lund

Brett King as Lt.

Louis Jean Heydt as Secretary of War

James Bridges as Pvt. Lewis

Charles Boaz as Corporal Dixon

Kenneth Alton as Trooper

Billy McCoy as Trooper

Jack Parker as Trooper

Joe Phillips as Trooper

Harry Strang as MSgt Shaugnessy

George Bell as Bandit

Joe Ferrante as Bandit

Milan Smith as Bandit

[cking398]

The King, The Pyramid, the Moon and the Angles of GOD I am Jesus Christ reborn as Chris H King and can prove it with the language of the Universe: Math. Introduction This book has four parts, the story of my life (even-numbered pages), the conclusive proof that Jesus H Christ was a messenger of GOD (undeniable FACT finally proven with the addition of ‘Moon witness’ from my discovery of the 27/7/2024, see chapter 1) and proof that I, Christopher Holmes King, am #Jesusreborn.  Lastly, my God-inspired ORDERS/recommendations for the world as the MESSIAH, to be clear. God chose me. This is not an election.

“Hey Chris, 

How's it going? 

Really good speaking with you the other day. Listen Chris - I know I have said this before.....but remember mate I am always here for you. 

If you ever need to talk, just give me a call. You have always been there for everyone else, ever since we were kids. No one else has ever come close. If there is one person who has a good heart.....it is you. Remember that and remember to give me a shout if there is anything. 

Hope all is well mate, 

John Kramer" July 9th, 2012 John Kramer is one of my best friends. An American Sherpardic Jew I got to know at the British School of Brussels during my teenage years.

There are too many apparent coincidences for these contentions not to be true.

Regarding coincidences, consider the following:

Agatha Christie: "One coincidence is just a coincidence, two coincidences are a clue, three coincidences are a proof."

Arthur Conan Doyle: (Mycroft Holmes): "What do we say about coincidences?" (Sherlock Holmes): "The universe is rarely so lazy."

So three coincidences, according to Agatha Christie amount to PROOF. Anything on top of that amount, I would surmise, would just be bonus material strengthening the proof and moving it closer to FACT. Well, I have 6 proofs that Jesus was the TRUE MESSENGER of GOD, the crucial proof I found was on the Sabbath of 27th of July, 2024, and is outlined in Chapter 1. Each alternate chapter will deal with the proofs. The second proof is also foundational, the Christ Angle in the Great Pyramid of Giza which was discovered in 1910 is also a proof with references to proverbs in the Bible. There are 6 proofs connecting Jesus to GOD. I have over 10 connecting me to Jesus Christ. Even numbered Chapters will deal with my life story, so if you just want to focus on the proofs to start with, simply read odd-numbered chapters first. This list shows a summary of the six proofs proving “Christ is King”, a nod to Candace Owens for popularizing this term (note: for the proofs connecting me to Christ, Chris is Christ, please read from Chapter 13 and the rest of the odd-numbered chapters):

PROOF 1 JESUS REAL MESSIAH, original Chris King discovery ofThe 27th SEP 2024 in Lasne, Belgium 

Diameter of the MOON 3474.8 KM divided bY: Distance Apex of Great Pyramid at Giza to Apex of Church of Nativity, Bethlehem 434.02 KM Is 8.006 to get a perfect 8 add 0.33 KM. Why 330 meters? He lived 33 years and times 10 because of the commandment's Probability of this being due to chance: NIL

Proof 2 (Discovered 1910)

2) The Christ Angle, discovered by the Edgar brothers in 1910.This relates to the fact that within the Great Pyramid of Giza, there are 2 main tunnels: they are inclined at exactly 26.3 degrees compared to the ground. Taking the the equator as the X-axis a line at the same angle it bisects Bethlehem. Thus the discoverers believed the Pyramid pointed through time to our most influential messenger.Probability if this being down to change over 1 in a MILLION.

Proof 3 (Well known fact Moon - Giza relationship)

The relationships between the Moon's diameter and the Great Pyramid of Giza's dimensions. These relationships are as follows (as analyzed by Mike Hooven on Quora):

* The height of the Great Pyramid is 482 feet. The sides are 755 feet in length. The ratio between the two dimensions is 0.638.

* The radii of the earth and moon are 3963 and 1080 miles respectively. Added together these distances total 5043 Miles. The ratio of this number to the diameter of the earth is 5043/7926 = 0.636 - very close to 0.638.

Proof 4: Psalms 89:37  the Old Testament. “Like the moon his throne will stand firm forever. It will be like a faithful witness in heaven." When taken into the context of the above three proofs this proverb shows that Jesus H Christ was and is a TRUE MESSENGER OF GOD. Proof 5: Mentioned more times in the Koran than Mohamed, Muslims can be counted among his followers (and unlike Christians, they correctly believe I will be human on my return). Bringing the total adherents of Jesus Christ to over half the world’s population.

Proof 6:  #WowSignal1977 JEUQ 6567….. 8 (If you draw out the graph that 65678 would make on a chart you would get the symbol of Nike (the sports brand known worldwide). Nike is the Goddess of Victory: is the next number in the sequence so says Jesus why repeat the S’es Einstein? The letters (not in sequence as above but easy to unjumble) ask a question of Jesus. I complete the sequence with an 8 and my LOVE for God is pure. Is the Universe friendly? Is generally agreed to be the most important question in the Universe asked by the most important scientist of the 20th Century: Albert Einstein. I am here to answer, God Wins: Yahweh Facebook.com/cking398 Rumble.com/cking398 cking398@yahoo.com TruthSocial.com/cking398 X : @Christo398398

[ukdailymail]

Rob Schneider apologizes to daughter Elle King for parenting

[nando161mando]

Far-Right grifters such as Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, disgraced Tucker Carlson writer Blake Neff, and Jack "Pizzagate" Posobiec are preparing a campaign around attacking Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Act.

Echoing decades of propaganda by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, Turning Point USA is now claiming that Americans have been fed a “fake history" of MLK.

As the GOP doubles down on pushing the white nationalist conspiracy theory of the "Great Replacement," racist trolls like Kirk and Posobiec are going to continue to spoon feed misinformation to their base in an effort to mainstream outright white supremacy.

Read the article in Wired here:

[godsaveforum]

[esonetwork]

Riders To The Stars | Episode 365

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/riders-to-the-stars-episode-365/

Riders To The Stars | Episode 365

Jim reflects on a 1954 Sci-Fi that had a large impact on him as a young Monster Kid. The film was the 2nd entry into Ivan Tors’ O.S.I. Trilogy -“Riders To The Stars,” starring Richard Carlson (who also directed), William Lundigan, Martha Hyer, Herbert Marshall, Robert Karnes, James Best and King Donovan. Four men are chosen to pilot a spacecraft and attempt to capture a meteor for study. Find out more about this early space adventure on this episode of MONSTER ATTACK!, The Podcast Dedicated To Old Monster Movies.

[rederiswrites]

Full text of Heather Cox Richardson's latest essay:

February 1, 2025 (Saturday)

Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.

The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality.

Last night, officials in the Trump administration purged the Federal Bureau of Investigation of all six of its top executives and, according to NBC’s Ken Dilanian, more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including those in Washington, D.C., and Miami, where officials pursued cases against now-president Trump. Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, who represented Trump in a number of his criminal cases, asked acting FBI director Brian J. Driscoll Jr. for a list of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases to “determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”

Clarissa-Jan Lim of MSNBC reported that Trump denied knowing about the dismissals but said the firings were “a good thing” because “[t]hey were very corrupt people, very corrupt, and they hurt our country very badly with the weaponization.”

Officials also fired 25 to 30 federal prosecutors who had worked on cases involving the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and reassigned others. Bove ordered the firings. Career civil servants can’t be fired without cause, and these purges come on top of the apparently illegal firing of 18 inspectors general across federal agencies and a purge of the Department of Justice of those who had worked on cases involving Trump.

Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5 in Nashville, Tennessee, reported on Friday that federal prosecutors were withdrawn from a criminal investigation of Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) for election fraud; Ogles recently filed a House resolution to enable Trump to run for a third term and another supporting Trump’s designs on Greenland. On Wednesday, federal prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss an election fraud case against former representative Jeffrey Fortenberry (R-NE). Trump called Fortenberry’s case an illustration of “the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats.”

That impulse to protect Trump showed yesterday in what a local water manager said was an “extremely unprecedented” release of water from two dams in California apparently to provide evidence of his social media post that the U.S. military had gone into California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” In fact, water was released from two reservoirs that hold water to supply farmland in the summer. They are about 500 miles (800 km) from Los Angeles, where the fires were earlier this year, and the water did not go to Southern California. “This is going to hurt farmers,” a water manager said, “This takes water out of the summer irrigation portfolio.” But Trump posted that if California officials had listened to him six years ago, there would have been no fires. Shashank Joshi of The Economist called it “real ‘mad king’ stuff.”

Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy.

Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson has been a vocal proponent of Orbán’s ideology, and J.D. Vance this week hired Carlson’s son, 28-year-old Buckley, as his deputy press secretary. Although Trump claimed during the campaign he didn't know anything about Project 2025, Steve Contorno and Casey Tolan of CNN estimate that more than two thirds of Trump’s executive orders mirror Project 2025.

You can see the influence of this faction in the indiscriminate immigration sweeps the administration has launched, Trump’s announcement that he is opening a 30,000-bed migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and officials’ revocation of protection for more than 600,000 Venezuelans legally in the U.S. and possibly also for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. You can see it in the administration’s attempt to end the birthright citizenship written into the U.S. Constitution in 1868.

It shows in the new administration's persecution of transgender Americans, including Trump’s executive order purging trans service members from the military, another limiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and yet another ordering trans federal prisoners to be medically detransitioned and then moved to facilities that correspond to their sex at birth, an outcome that a trans woman suing the administration calls “humiliating, terrifying, and dangerous.”

The administration has ordered that federal employees must remove all pronouns from their email signatures and, as Jeremy Faust reported in Inside Medicine, that researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must scrub from their work any references to “[g]ender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” Faust notes that the requirements are vague and that because “most manuscripts include demographic information about the populations or patients studied,” the order potentially affects “just about any major study…including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else.”

Those embracing this ideology are also isolationist. As soon as he took office, Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid except for military aid to Israel and Egypt, abruptly cutting off about $60 billion in funding—less than 1% of the U.S. budget—to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides humanitarian assistance to fight starvation and provide basic medical care for the globe’s most vulnerable and desperate populations. The outcry, both from those appalled that the U.S. would renege on its promises to provide food for children in war-torn countries and from those who recognize that the U.S. withdrawal from these popular programs would create a vacuum China is eager to fill, made Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, say that “humanitarian programs” would be exempted from the freeze, but that appears either untrue or so complicated to negotiate that programs are shutting down anyway.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appears to be beside himself over this destruction. “Let me explain why the total destruction of USAID…matters so much,” he posted on social media. “China—where Musk makes his money—wants USAID destroyed. So does Russia. Trump and Musk are doing the bidding of Beijing and Moscow. Why?” “The U.S. is in full retreat from the world,” he wrote, and there is “[n]o good reason for it. The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on U.S. aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the U.S. will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. U.S. power will shrink. U.S. jobs will be lost.” Murphy speculated that “billionaires like Musk who make $ in China” or “someone buying all that secret Trump meme coin” would benefit from deliberately sabotaging eighty years of U.S. goodwill on the international stage.

And that brings us to the third faction: that of the tech bros, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who according to year-end Federal Election Commission filings spent more than $290 million supporting Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Musk appears to consider colonizing space imperative for the survival of humanity, and part of that goal requires slashing government regulations, as well as receiving government contracts that help to fund his space program.

Before he took office, Trump named Musk and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, to an extra-governmental group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but Musk has assumed full control of the group, whose mission is to cut the federal budget by as much as $2 trillion.

Musk is interested in the government for future contracts, although a report from January 30, when Musk’s Tesla company filed its annual financial report, showed that the company, which is valued at more than $1 trillion and which made $2.3 billion in 2024, paid $0 in federal income tax. Today, Musk’s X social media company became a form of state media when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it would no longer email updates about this week’s two plane crashes—one in Washington, D.C., and one in Philadelphia—and that reporters would have to get their information through X.

Musk’s goal might well be the crux of the drastic cuts to federal aid, as well as the attempt last week from the Office of Management and Budget to “pause” federal funding and grants to make sure funding reflected Trump’s goals. After a public outcry over the loss of payments to local law enforcement, Meals on Wheels for shut-ins, supplemental nutrition programs, and so on, the OMB rescinded its first memo, but then White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately contradicted the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect.

The chaos surrounding the cuts could have been designed to make it difficult for opponents to sue over them. This method of changing government priorities through “impoundment” is illegal. Congress—which is the body that represents the American people—appropriates the money for programs, and the president takes an oath to execute the laws. After President Richard M. Nixon tried it, Congress passed a 1974 law making impoundment expressly illegal. But the on-again-off-again confusion appeared at first to stand a chance of stopping lawsuits. It didn’t work: a federal judge halted the funding freeze, suggesting it was a blatant violation of the Constitution.

But then, yesterday, Elon Musk forced the resignation of David A. Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department. Lebryk had been at Treasury since 1989 and had risen to become the person in charge of the U.S. government payment system that disburses about $6 trillion a year through Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, contracts, grants, salaries for federal government workers, tax refunds, and so on, essentially managing the nation’s checkbook.

According to Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post, Musk’s team wanted access to the payment system. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) demanded answers from Trump’s new Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warning that “these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”

Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to.

Wyden continued by reminding Bessent that the press has reported that Musk has previously been “denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China—a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems—endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.”

This afternoon, Wyden posted that he has been told that Bessent has given the Department of Government Efficiency full access to the system. “Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk's own companies. All of it.”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elons basement. Anyone who gets a check from soc sec or anything else[,] he can cut it off or see all y[ou]r personal and financial data.” Pundit Stuart Stevens called it “the most significant data leak in cyber history.”

All three of these factions are focused on destroying the federal government, which, after all, represents the American people through their elected representatives and spends their taxpayer money. Musk, who is an unelected adjunct to Trump, this evening gleefully referred to the civil servants in the government who work for the American people as “the opposing team.”

But something jumps out from the chaos of the past two weeks. Instructions are vague, circumstances are chaotic, and it’s unclear who is making decisions. That confusion makes it hard to enforce laws or sue, although observers note that what’s going on is “illegal and a breach of the constitutional order.”

Our federal government rests on the U.S. Constitution. The three different factions of Trump's MAGA Republicans agree that the government must be destroyed, and they are operating outside the constitutional order, not eager to win legal victories so much as determined to slash and burn down the government without them.

Today, senior Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake noted that while it is traditional for cabinet nominees to pledge that they will refuse to honor illegal presidential orders, at least seven of Trump’s nominees have sidestepped that question. Attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, now-confirmed defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, small business administrator nominee Kelly Loeffler, Veterans Affairs secretary nominee Douglas A. Collins, and commerce secretary nominee Howard Lutnick all avoided the question by saying that Trump would never ask them to do anything illegal. FBI director nominee Kash Patel just said he would “always obey the law.”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Barbara Rogan

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 1, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 02, 2025

Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.

The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality.

Last night, officials in the Trump administration purged the Federal Bureau of Investigation of all six of its top executives and, according to NBC’s Ken Dilanian, more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including those in Washington, D.C., and Miami, where officials pursued cases against now-president Trump. Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, who represented Trump in a number of his criminal cases, asked acting FBI director Brian J. Driscoll Jr. for a list of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases to “determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”

Clarissa-Jan Lim of MSNBC reported that Trump denied knowing about the dismissals but said the firings were “a good thing” because “[t]hey were very corrupt people, very corrupt, and they hurt our country very badly with the weaponization.”

Officials also fired 25 to 30 federal prosecutors who had worked on cases involving the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and reassigned others. Bove ordered the firings. Career civil servants can’t be fired without cause, and these purges come on top of the apparently illegal firing of 18 inspectors general across federal agencies and a purge of the Department of Justice of those who had worked on cases involving Trump.

Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5 in Nashville, Tennessee, reported on Friday that federal prosecutors were withdrawn from a criminal investigation of Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) for election fraud; Ogles recently filed a House resolution to enable Trump to run for a third term and another supporting Trump’s designs on Greenland. On Wednesday, federal prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss an election fraud case against former representative Jeffrey Fortenberry (R-NE). Trump called Fortenberry’s case an illustration of “the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats.”

That impulse to protect Trump showed yesterday in what a local water manager said was an “extremely unprecedented” release of water from two dams in California apparently to provide evidence of his social media post that the U.S. military had gone into California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” In fact, water was released from two reservoirs that hold water to supply farmland in the summer. They are about 500 miles (800 km) from Los Angeles, where the fires were earlier this year, and the water did not go to Southern California. “This is going to hurt farmers,” a water manager said, “This takes water out of the summer irrigation portfolio.” But Trump posted that if California officials had listened to him six years ago, there would have been no fires. Shashank Joshi of The Economist called it “real ‘mad king’ stuff.”

Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy.

Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson has been a vocal proponent of Orbán’s ideology, and J.D. Vance this week hired Carlson’s son, 28-year-old Buckley, as his deputy press secretary. Although Trump claimed during the campaign he didn't know anything about Project 2025, Steve Contorno and Casey Tolan of CNN estimate that more than two thirds of Trump’s executive orders mirror Project 2025.

You can see the influence of this faction in the indiscriminate immigration sweeps the administration has launched, Trump’s announcement that he is opening a 30,000-bed migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and officials’ revocation of protection for more than 600,000 Venezuelans legally in the U.S. and possibly also for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. You can see it in the administration’s attempt to end the birthright citizenship written into the U.S. Constitution in 1868.

It shows in the new administration's persecution of transgender Americans, including Trump’s executive order purging trans service members from the military, another limiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and yet another ordering trans federal prisoners to be medically detransitioned and then moved to facilities that correspond to their sex at birth, an outcome that a trans woman suing the administration calls “humiliating, terrifying, and dangerous.”

The administration has ordered that federal employees must remove all pronouns from their email signatures and, as Jeremy Faust reported in Inside Medicine, that researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must scrub from their work any references to “[g]ender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” Faust notes that the requirements are vague and that because “most manuscripts include demographic information about the populations or patients studied,” the order potentially affects “just about any major study…including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else.”

Those embracing this ideology are also isolationist. As soon as he took office, Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid except for military aid to Israel and Egypt, abruptly cutting off about $60 billion in funding—less than 1% of the U.S. budget—to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides humanitarian assistance to fight starvation and provide basic medical care for the globe’s most vulnerable and desperate populations. The outcry, both from those appalled that the U.S. would renege on its promises to provide food for children in war-torn countries and from those who recognize that the U.S. withdrawal from these popular programs would create a vacuum China is eager to fill, made Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, say that “humanitarian programs” would be exempted from the freeze, but that appears either untrue or so complicated to negotiate that programs are shutting down anyway.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appears to be beside himself over this destruction. “Let me explain why the total destruction of USAID…matters so much,” he posted on social media. “China—where Musk makes his money—wants USAID destroyed. So does Russia. Trump and Musk are doing the bidding of Beijing and Moscow. Why?” “The U.S. is in full retreat from the world,” he wrote, and there is “[n]o good reason for it. The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on U.S. aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the U.S. will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. U.S. power will shrink. U.S. jobs will be lost.” Murphy speculated that “billionaires like Musk who make $ in China” or “someone buying all that secret Trump meme coin” would benefit from deliberately sabotaging eighty years of U.S. goodwill on the international stage.

And that brings us to the third faction: that of the tech bros, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who according to year-end Federal Election Commission filings spent more than $290 million supporting Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Musk appears to consider colonizing space imperative for the survival of humanity, and part of that goal requires slashing government regulations, as well as receiving government contracts that help to fund his space program.

Before he took office, Trump named Musk and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, to an extra-governmental group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but Musk has assumed full control of the group, whose mission is to cut the federal budget by as much as $2 trillion.

Musk is interested in the government for future contracts, although a report from January 30, when Musk’s Tesla company filed its annual financial report, showed that the company, which is valued at more than $1 trillion and which made $2.3 billion in 2024, paid $0 in federal income tax. Today, Musk’s X social media company became a form of state media when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it would no longer email updates about this week’s two plane crashes—one in Washington, D.C., and one in Philadelphia—and that reporters would have to get their information through X.

Musk’s goal might well be the crux of the drastic cuts to federal aid, as well as the attempt last week from the Office of Management and Budget to “pause” federal funding and grants to make sure funding reflected Trump’s goals. After a public outcry over the loss of payments to local law enforcement, Meals on Wheels for shut-ins, supplemental nutrition programs, and so on, the OMB rescinded its first memo, but then White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately contradicted the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect.

The chaos surrounding the cuts could have been designed to make it difficult for opponents to sue over them. This method of changing government priorities through “impoundment” is illegal. Congress—which is the body that represents the American people—appropriates the money for programs, and the president takes an oath to execute the laws. After President Richard M. Nixon tried it, Congress passed a 1974 law making impoundment expressly illegal. But the on-again-off-again confusion appeared at first to stand a chance of stopping lawsuits. It didn’t work: a federal judge halted the funding freeze, suggesting it was a blatant violation of the Constitution.

But then, yesterday, Elon Musk forced the resignation of David A. Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department. Lebryk had been at Treasury since 1989 and had risen to become the person in charge of the U.S. government payment system that disburses about $6 trillion a year through Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, contracts, grants, salaries for federal government workers, tax refunds, and so on, essentially managing the nation’s checkbook.

According to Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post, Musk’s team wanted access to the payment system. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) demanded answers from Trump’s new Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warning that “these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”

Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to.

Wyden continued by reminding Bessent that the press has reported that Musk has previously been “denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China—a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems—endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.”

This afternoon, Wyden posted that he has been told that Bessent has given the Department of Government Efficiency full access to the system. “Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk's own companies. All of it.”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elons basement. Anyone who gets a check from soc sec or anything else[,] he can cut it off or see all y[ou]r personal and financial data.” Pundit Stuart Stevens called it “the most significant data leak in cyber history.”

All three of these factions are focused on destroying the federal government, which, after all, represents the American people through their elected representatives and spends their taxpayer money. Musk, who is an unelected adjunct to Trump, this evening gleefully referred to the civil servants in the government who work for the American people as “the opposing team.”

But something jumps out from the chaos of the past two weeks. Instructions are vague, circumstances are chaotic, and it’s unclear who is making decisions. That confusion makes it hard to enforce laws or sue, although observers note that what’s going on is “illegal and a breach of the constitutional order.”

Our federal government rests on the U.S. Constitution. The three different factions of Trump's MAGA Republicans agree that the government must be destroyed, and they are operating outside the constitutional order, not eager to win legal victories so much as determined to slash and burn down the government without them.

Today, senior Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake noted that while it is traditional for cabinet nominees to pledge that they will refuse to honor illegal presidential orders, at least seven of Trump’s nominees have sidestepped that question. Attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, now-confirmed defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, small business administrator nominee Kelly Loeffler, Veterans Affairs secretary nominee Douglas A. Collins, and commerce secretary nominee Howard Lutnick all avoided the question by saying that Trump would never ask them to do anything illegal. FBI director nominee Kash Patel just said he would “always obey the law.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON