Not Incompetence. Design. How Government Was Rewired to Protect Crime

What’s worse than playing football with no helmet?

Playing football with a fake helmet that you have mistaken for real.

With no helmet, you’d know to be careful. With a fake helmet, you just get your head split when it turns out that “Cadbury” is not much help against a linebacker.

“Put me in, Coach.”

I have used this analogy a number of times around regulators like FDA approving as “safe and effective” products that clearly are neither of those things (and doing so on the basis of meaningless biomarkers).

The CDC refused to even monitor vaccine safety under COVID. They just flat out didn’t do it. They went out of their way to break the AE reporting. It was like sitting in a house consumed by raging fire while the smoke alarm sat mum.

And people said things like, “Well, if the house were really on fire, the alarm would go off, so obviously, this is fine…”

And we all saw how that worked out…

But this is not unique to health.

Increasingly, we see agency after agency in which it’s clear that someone took the batteries out.

It’s legitimately amazing how fake these government systems have become.

They have passed “unsuited to purpose” and reached “directly and intentionally antithetical” to it.

They seem to even lack systems to hold agencies and agents accountable.

And you don’t diverge this far from sane and sensible practice by accident.

Here’s some video from a Minnesota House hearing where Walz appointee Erin Campbell of the Management and Budget Office admitted under questioning by Chair Kristin Robbins that her agency, wait for it, lacks enforcement tools to hold state agencies accountable for fraud. Read that again. Despite statutory duties to oversee fiscal controls, the OMB do not even really have a structure to do so.

It’s surreal.

And this is not incompetence, it’s agenda.

Well, we let them police themselves. We “create a framework for agencies to use and (provide) support and resources and tools for them to use in order to identify and implement their own internal controls.”

Put simply, we let the foxes manage their own henhouse activities.

“And when they fail at that, what do you do?”

The look of dumbfounded “what?” on Campbell’s face here in response to this most obvious of questions is as telling as it is astonishing. She’s legitimately speechless. You can basically see, “Do? We do nothing. What the hell is she talking about?” rattling through her screensaver-mode visage. She passes the question off.

Her associate says, “What we do is step in with support.”

It’s all of a piece.

“I know you’re asking the question ‘what do we need to hold agencies accountable?’ but I would view that differently and that would be to say ‘what do we need for agencies to be successful?’”

This is a master class in semantic smokescreen, embedding the idea that for these agencies somehow “being accountable” diverges from “being successful” and that we can set some standard for “success” which sidesteps pesky ideas like “being held to account.”

You seriously cannot make this up.

Nor can you make up things like this:

$430 million in fraud just in MN in a few days of looking at fake SBA loans. You basically cannot turn over a rock in the Walz fiefdom without “learning” about some quality new fraud. It’s absolutely endemic, a fully metastatic cancer that has seemingly spread to every institution, statehouse, doghouse, and outhouse. The MN government is starting to look like one of these hulls where if you scrape off the rust, there won’t be any boat left underneath.

And this is not an accident.

And this is not just Minnesota.

You’re going to see this play out all over America because this is going on all over America.

The fourth, unelected branch of government has become crime.

And, as they emerge, the percentages are going to shock people who blissfully thought that “sure, there’s a little, but it’s not too bad, there are people who keep an eye on stuff like this!”

Something like a third of all payments in the US federal payments system don’t even have identifiers on them. You could march an entire army through that opacity. Honestly, I’m concerned that perhaps someone has.

One of the really important shifts in perspective is this simple realization:

These government programs are not complete travesties because the people involved are stupid.

They are like this because someone wants them this way.

It’s easy to assume that this is just lazy, unconscientious, room temperature IQ people doing lazy, room temperature IQ people things because there are so many people who fit that description populating these systems and agencies, but to do so misses the game.

Those people were selected for and placed into these roles by people who were not stupid. They were put in place by people with plans. The useful idiots are just cannon fodder, filling roles and playing the patsy while flouncing around with fancy titles and sinecures rooted in implausible levels of unaccountable job security.

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