What Now?
by G. Murphy Donovan (December 2024)
A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation. —James Freeman Clarke
I suppose everyone has a wish list after an election, especially when the election represents a sea change, a golden opportunity to chart a new course for the ship of state. Indeed, America, and the world, has been tossed and blown by angry political seas in the last four years. To begin, in 2020, our intelligence and military establishment was humiliated in Afghanistan by the Taliban, a third world army of Islamic terrorists driving pickup trucks.
Defeat by Islamic religious thugs was a bad omen from the start for Joe Biden; quickly followed by personal familial humiliations at the hands of a junkie son and a grifting brother, nepotistic corruption that goes back to the Obama administration when Biden was then a vice-president.
Having lost one war decisively, team Biden/Harris then proceeded to double down on the Ukraine dumpster fire, insisting that Kiev was winning when no facts on the ground suggests victory to this day. As a lame duck, Joe Biden is now playing nuclear chicken; throwing good money after bad, escalating a war to the Russian heartland with long range US rockets.
None of this has been lost on opportunistic Islam, religious fascists who recognized a weak hand on the American national tiller, eventually launching an imprudent attack on Israeli civilians in 2023. Now, Shiite and Sunni terrorists have joined forces in yet another war to cleanse Jews from the Levant.
Thank God, Bibi Netanyahu, not Joe Biden, is calling the shots in the latest war with Islam. On all sides today, the Ummah seems willing to fight Israel right down to the last Palestinian or Persian.
Adding insult to injury, team Biden/Harris is going down with the ship, calling for cease fires with Islamic terror on Israel’s borders whilst cultivating a larger war with Russia. If our foreign policy were a Tom Clancy fiction today, no one would buy it.
Ironic it is that a US politician who spawned coups in Afghanistan and Ukraine, and attempted to bring down an Israeli government, fell victim himself to an internecine political coup in Washington. Who says there’s no poetry in justice?
Joseph Robinette Biden may go down in History as the most naïve politician in American history. In the year of the dragon, reckless coup plotting, among other feckless policies, created a domestic monster that devoured Biden/Harris, and maybe their political majority, in a single swallow.
So there are many problems to solve and many hapless policies to unravel. Besides well wishes and prayers, here is my wish list of changes or reforms for the new administration, in a rough order of priorities.
Or as Leonard Cohen might put it; “Everything has a crack in it. That’s how the light gets in.”
CPB and BBC Propaganda
If you control a coast-to-coast pulpit, you can control the national message.
The US Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), between PBS and NPR, controls nearly 1500 broadcast outlets, making it the largest media monopoly in America. Cooperative arrangements with British, Canadian, Japanese and various other EU state controlled radio and television webs make it the largest liberal media operation on the planet. American CPB claims to be a matrix of “independent and non-profit” stations when in fact CPB affiliates now receive revenue from, and share content with, state controlled partners like BBC and DW.
Triple dipping is now common with commercials, tax monies, and so called non-profit “charitable” tax deductible donations in the mix. When it comes to inscrutable tax-exempt, “non-profit” revenue sources, CPB is a trifecta plus, a self-flushing dark money toilet.
Fiscal hocus pocus, slights of hand, and rhetorical obfuscation at CPB is protected from public scrutiny by its private, non-profit status. CPB and its domestic and foreign affiliates are neither private nor non-profit, hence the adjective “public” is the oxymoronic keyword in the CPB, PBS and NPR world of partisan praxis, ambiguities, word salads, and acronyms.
CPB is in fact a woke, liberal, and/or establishment message control platform dressed in a patronizing burka of partisan politics; politically correct cultural pandering, and puerile public service posturing. Surely there is a smidgen of unique programming on CPB platforms, classical music for example. But if the cost of a cultural gesture is corrupt partisan news coverage and commentary, the price of propaganda is too high.
Note to Elon and Vivek: political pandering by our legacy media may be as American as apple pie, but let’s not use tax monies to fund partisan political bravo sierra on CPB airways—and then call it a charity, a tax exempt, necessary public “service.”
The Doe Dilemma
Public broadcasting and public education suffer from many of the same problems, brothers by the same mother if you will. Whilst both may sound like good ideas in the abstract; in practice both, as federal institutions, have become the enemy of ideas. The American public school system, once the envy of the world, has slipped from first to 25th place in global standings, somewhere down there where banana republics and third world autocrats are gasping for air.
And like the abortion hot potato; education praxis, children, and young adults might benefit from bureaucratic decentralization, indeed, a holiday from woke federal ideologues and civil service apparatchiks. Our various states have variable values, politics, and standards. Clearly, one school house does not fit all.
The advent of federal academic mandarins has done little but lower the bar for K through 12th grade. The rot is starting to show also at the college/university level where your pet could get a degree in subjects like “Education,” but only if your cocker spaniel can afford meaningless certificates and diplomas.
Academic credentials are for sale today. If you can pay, you can play. The object of public schooling from kindergarten through doctorate today is fungible credentials; not learning, achievement, or scholarship. The real tragedy is that the public K-12 school house is now run by functional idiots with those useless, albeit well paid credentials, advanced degrees in “method,” not serious academic subject matter.
Gender Studies or Women Studies could take a bow here. Jonathan Willoughby at BBC and Katherine Maher at NPR are examples of the kind of political or ideological feminists produced by the failed schoolhouses these days.
Public education in America today could be characterized as the most expensive network of government financed child abuse in the world.
Indeed, college graduates today do not expect to do as well as their parents today for good reason. Generation “whatever” might be schooled on pronoun and identity hokum, yet after 16 years of schooling, “TicTok” graduates are still not equipped with fungible moral, social, or workplace skills.
Civil Service Reform
Hollywood, the legacy media, and the Democrat Party may be on suicide watch, but America still owes a debt of gratitude to team Biden/Harris. First, for sticking with their guy long enough for the legacy media to throw Biden under the bus; and secondly for spending on and pretending that Kamala Harris was a brilliant alternative.
Win/win for America—and Republicans.
Alas, a Republican presidential victory is just a moment, just an opportunity, not necessarily an achievement. The vast number of federal departments and the Civil Service are all still in Democrat Party hands. Even with the recent Republican landslide nationally, the Beltway and the DMV (District, Maryland, and Virginia bedroom communities) still voted 9 to 1 for Democrats.
The federal work force is a DMV Democrat demographic. There’s little that any administration can do to change partisanship in the Civil Service and federal departments. That train left the station with FDR.
Alas, we already see resistance and pushback from governors in Democrat controlled cities/states and across the federal departments. Bad losers lose badly. Indeed, malcontent demographics, the Left Coast and Hollywood, are even threatening to leave the country.
Adios, says the smart money.
Fear and loathing midst the usual suspects, the media, the establishment, and the Civil Service, seem to validate the notion that the “enemy within” is alive and well. Indeed, passive aggressive and activist subversion worked well during the original incarnation of Trump.
Expect more of the same in 2025.
In DC, the federal government and subservient contractors are the only game in town. The DMV and the capital establishment is a captive audience, determined to preserve their privilege; tenure, annual pay raises, and that recession proof bubble in and around Washington, DC.
Nevertheless, there are several things that might be done to bring an entrenched deep state to heel.
A first choice might be to freeze federal hiring and put DC agencies on a diet, across the board. Allow federal bloat to shrink through attrition. Another notion might be to suspend autopilot pay raises so civil servants get to live like the taxpayers they are supposed to serve.
Automatic annual pay raises make incompetence and dead wood inevitable.
A move is already underway to move federal agencies out of the DMV and that program should be hastened at all costs. If federal agencies need to look like America, then put them out in flyover country so that these agencies recruit in the heartland and experience working America, become real public servants again.
Supporting malcontents is another option; those who threaten to quit and/or leave if and when they cannot abide reform. Yes, the best way to deal with passive aggressive sedition is to put federal employees out on the street where reality and ground truth meet at the merge.
A final suggestion might be to start sending key messages to key federal sinecures like the Intelligence Community, the Justice Department, and especially the FBI. Take that new FBI Headquarters for starters; now a testimony to, or a validation of, Biden era lawfare and partisan policing. Rewarding a corrupt FBI with a bigger and better HQ in the DMV sends all the wrong messages, more than a little like casting pearl before swine.
If we continue to reward incompetence and sedition, America can be assured we will see more of it, in the nation’s capitol and across federal agencies.
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G. Murphy Donovan writes about Intelligence and national security. Follow him on X.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast
