Meet Jeffrey Epstein.

wild find, how the media first introduced Jeffrey Epstein 25 years ago https://t.co/RZLXdHQvKr

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) February 10, 2026

AND: As long as I'm embedding things from Mike Benz this morning:

"The email said appointees running U.S.A.I.D. were firing 2,000 employees based in the United States...."

"The mass firings are part of a series of layoffs of agency employees by the Trump administration during a broad effort to halt almost all U.S. foreign aid using a blanket freeze. The moves came after a judge ruled on Friday that the Trump administration could proceed with plans to lay off or put on paid leave many agency employees and close down operations overseas...."

From "Trump Appointees Fire 2,000 U.S.A.I.D. Employees and Put Others Worldwide on Leave/The announcement, by email, came two days after a judge said the Trump administration could proceed with plans that amount to dismantling the aid agency" (NYT).

"I've told you before I genuinely believe that you are a pivotal historical figure, and you are going to transform this country.... We need a man on a white horse now."

"We need somebody who... has the spine and the guts and the strength to challenge orthodoxies, to stand in the way of vested interests, and to break institutions that have turned against our democracy. President Trump has shown again and again that he is that hero.... My uncle started USAID in 1961 for humanitarian purposes... It has become a sinister propagator of totalitarianism and war.... And President Trump saw that and he stood up to it... and we want to do the same thing with the institutions that are stealing the health of our children. We need a revolutionary figure, and you are that figure."

Said RFK Jr., in the Oval Office, after his swearing in as the new Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Longer version of the quote:

Grok or ChatGPT — here's the one question that made the choice clear to me.

Here's ChatGPT:

And here's Grok:

"How horrifying it is on the regular."

I'm listening "Resistance, Where Art Thou?," the new episode of the NYT "Matter of Opinion" podcast. At 5:28 in the linked audio/transcript, Ross Douthat says:

From 2016 to 2020, there was a sense that there was a fundamental liberal, or at least center left majority in America that had been unfairly denied its rightful position of power and influence. And so it just made sense to say, we just need to mobilize.... [I]n the early days of 2017, and indeed throughout his presidency, [the White House] was filled with people who were not at all loyal to Donald Trump. Some of whom were just total opportunists, some of whom were sort of, you know, respectable Republican figures who felt like they were there to manage the weird, bizarre phenomenon of the Trump presidency. But those people played a very important role, a kind of feedback loop in driving the energy of the resistance by basically leaking constantly about how crazy things were inside the Trump White House.... [T]he teams that exist in the Trump White House this time have esprit de corps. They have internal loyalty and cohesion. And so whatever is going on... in the kind of Trumpian attempt to remake the executive branch, you know, people aren't interested in just telling Politico and The New York Times all about how horrifying it is on the regular.

By the way, I had a long conversation with Grok about the idiom "on the regular." I won't link to it. Have your own conversation with your own robot. 

I also wanted to quote this from Michelle Cottle: "There was a big piece in Politico saying, oh, you know, the Democrats are, are taking the bait by defending USAID, Americans hate USAID. They think that, you know, we give way too much money to people abroad and things like that. And... I, personally... I am much more familiar with the left critiques of USAID and the work that it's done around the world."

The left critiques of USAID. Where's the NYT article about that? When are we going to hear that side of the story? When — if — Elon Musk releases it into the public domain? Who wants to see that and who is desperately afraid?

"Elon's not shy" and the Japanese Prime Minister is not "trying to suck up."

The event was a meeting between President Trump and the Prime Minister of Japan, Shigeru Ishiba, but a reporter saw fit to exploit the occasion to provoke Trump about Musk: "Do you have a reaction into the new Time Magazine cover that has Elon Musk sitting behind your Resolute Desk?":

Trump says a simple "no" in a way that sounded to me like it meant what a stupid question. 

Then, after the translator conveys the question and short answer to the Japanese Prime Minister, Trump deadpans, "Is Time Magazine still in business? I didn't even know."

The translation ensues, and Trump gets to start again. Reponse #1 was the "no," response #2 was the joke, and response #3, was to praise Musk: "Elon is doing a great job. He's finding tremendous fraud and corruption and waste. You see it with the USAID, but you're going to see it even more so with other agencies and other parts of government. He's got a staff that's fantastic... [USAID is] a fraud... very little being put to good use. Every single line that I look at in terms of events and transactions is either corrupt or ridiculous, and we're going to be doing that throughout government and I think we're going to be very close to balancing budgets for the first time in many years...."

There's a follow-up question: "Will you put Elon Musk on the podium for us to ask him some questions?"

Trump: "Oh, sure. He's not shy. Elon's not shy."

As for Shigeru Ishiba... earlier he had appealed to Trump's ego.

Autocrats everywhere.

Here's Samantha Power, writing "I Ran U.S.A.I.D. /Killing It Is a Win for Autocrats Everywhere" (NYT).

Of course, she will defend her reign, but what are her most substantive points and does she accept any blame? That's my attitude as I'm reading this to make some excerpts for you. Power begins by listing some things that will seem good to many or most Americans — health programs, "giving girls a chance to get an education," "growing local economies," "helping communities rebuild after ISIS."

She asserts that these activities have "generated vast stores of political capital" for the United States. They have also, she said, been the subject of attacks by China and Russia. Those attacks she calls "propaganda." And what we did... well, that was in the interest of the United States:

"I want to tell you that this is not about politics. But foreign aid is the least popular thing government spends money on."

"And I spent a lot of time in my career defending it and explaining it. But it’s harder and harder to do across the board. It really is. But for those of us in charge of doing the work of foreign policy, we understand it is essential. The United States is not walking away from foreign aid. It’s not. But it has to be programs that we can defend. It has to be programs that we can explain. It has to be programs that we can justify. Otherwise, we do endanger foreign aid.... We had a problem with some people in the office.... Does that mean that the actions of 5, 10, 20, 50 people indicted an entire organization? No. But we had people pushing through payments, despite being told not to do so.... [They were] almost inviting themselves to be getting in trouble so they can make a news story out of it. That is not the way we sought to pursue it. And as a result, it required us to do something else in return.... We’re just going to have to do it a little faster than we thought."

Said Marco Rubio, quoted in "Transcript Shows Rubio Asking U.S.A.I.D. Worker for ‘Trust’ and ‘Patience’/Speaking at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City, the secretary of state called foreign aid 'the least popular thing' that government pays for" (NYT).

That happened yesterday. Today, I see this at the NYT: "The Trump administration plans to retain only about 290 of the more than 10,000 employees worldwide at the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to three people with knowledge of the planned cuts to the work force. The cuts were communicated to agency leaders in a call on Thursday."

Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein talk about the "crazy shit" Elon and his 6 "young wizards" have found over at USAID.

Full 3-hour episode — audio and transcript — here, at Podscribe. Full 3-hour video here, at YouTube.

ROGAN: "It's very strange that the media's ignoring it, especially the left wing media. It's just too big of a win for the right. And so they're just ignoring it. And then they're just highlighting the good things that USAID did, which I'm sure it probably did. Probably had to do some good things to like at least justify its existence."

WEINSTEIN: "As a cover story? I'm not even sure. Maybe. It doesn't change anything. Obviously this was a mechanism used to funnel money to all sorts of things that we didn't vote on, that don't make sense in light of our constitutional structure. And I'm, you know, I obviously have concerns like everybody else about where this train takes us, but seeing that structure broken up is, it's a huge relief."

"THE LEFT WING 'RAG,' KNOWN AS 'POLITICO,' SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000"

Donald Trump is all-caps-ing — at Truth Social — about the biggest scandal of them all:

LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A “PAYOFF” FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS. THE LEFT WING “RAG,” KNOWN AS “POLITICO,” SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000. Did the New York Times receive money??? Who else did??? THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY! THE DEMOCRATS CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS ONE. TOO BIG, TOO DIRTY!

ADDED: I don't know what's been going on lately, but I blogged this on September 6, 2022: 

"We want to prove that being nonpartisan is actually the more successful positioning."

Said Mathias Döpfner, quoted in "Politico’s new German owner has a ‘contrarian’ plan for American media/Mathias Döpfner has global ambitions for what he calls a more ‘nonpartisan’ kind of journalism — even as his own politics are hard to pin down" (Washington Post).

Is Politico a giant scandal?

I was seeing tweets connecting it to USAID, but I hesitated to blog it. Now, Meade sends me this link to ZeroHedge: "Politico, NY Times Propped Up By Millions Of Dollars From US Government." So, I'm putting that up and I'll excerpt this:

On Tuesday, staffers at Politico were notified that a 'technical error' had prevented paychecks from going out. Many joked that this had something to do with the Trump administration putting a freeze on USAID funding....And while there's no evidence the two are linked, the suggestion prompted internet sleuths to look into Politico's sources of funding. What they found was absolutely shocking. According to government spending tracker website USASPENDING.gov, Politico — which laundered the Hunter Biden '51 intel officials' propaganda during the 2020 election — received up to $27 million (and by some counts $32 million) from various US agencies during the Biden years....

"It became apparent that it’s not an apple with a worm. What we have is just a ball of worms. You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair."

Said Elon Musk, quoted in "USAID staffers told to stay out of DC headquarters after Musk said Trump agreed to shut it down: ‘Just a ball of worms'" (NY Post).

Trump [said]... that USAID, which was founded in 1961 to provide humanitarian, developmental and security assistance, had “been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out.”...  Musk and other critics have accused the agency of funneling money toward left-wing causes in the roughly 120 countries it assists....

Things not garnered.

The United States is losing ground in the battle to garner influence through humanitarian aid because we now refuse to help countries who don’t celebrate sexual deviancy

Meanwhile, Russia and China are happy to step in and eat our lunch

— Merritt Corrigan (@MerrittCorrigan) August 3, 2020

Via "Trump USAID appointee unloads as rocky tenure ends/The deputy White House liaison at the aid agency blasted Democrats and her colleagues for what she called 'rampant anti-Christian sentiment'" (Politico).