The thing about a lie is that if you’ve been gullible, if you’ve fallen for the lie, you need to stay within the lie or otherwise you feel like you’re stupid, you feel like you’ve been made a fool of. It’s how lockdowns worked, and how vaccines worked — even now, with what we know, what’s coming out every single day, those who fell for the lie don’t want to leave the lie because to leave the lie means they have to face the reality that they were idiots.
On March 4, 1933, newly inaugurated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his customary address. The speech “brought a decidedly favorable reaction in the Italian press, especially his declaration that he will seek extraordinary powers to deal with the situation if necessary,” wrote The New York Times the next day. The Times went on to quote “Premier Mussolini’s Milan newspaper, Popolo d’Italia,” which stated that “The American people place their hope in decisive action by the new President and his speech truly satisfied public opinion.”
The Italian newspaper “said the bank moratorium in New York contributed perhaps more than any other factor in convincing even the most reluctant of the urgent necessity for the whole nation to rally around Mr. Roosevelt.” A Turin paper succinctly stated its appreciation for FDR: “Mr. Roosevelt is following the great principles established by the Fascist revolution and the genius of Il Duce.”
On March 4, 1789, the first bicameral Congress of the United States met in New York, New York, in accordance with the new Constitution.
Two years later on the same date, Vermont was admitted as the fourteenth state of the union.
In a twist in World War II allegiances, Finland declared war on Nazi Germany on March 4, 1945, beginning the Lapland War.
First, Trump fires the holdover director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a radically anti-business agency. He appoints the new treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as acting director.
Bessent orders the agency to stop everything — “rulemaking, communications, litigation,” Bloomberg Lawreported. “A source inside the bureau who asked to remain anonymous said the order appeared to shut down the CFPB altogether, for the time being.”
So far, so good.
Trump replaces acting director Bessent with Russ Vought, a former and also the new director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The CFPB’s website goes dark and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) begins to audit the books.
Musk and his team will find bad things. But “efficiency” isn’t quite the issue. Suppose the Bureau proves to be extremely efficient and noncorrupt at the task of making businesses extremely inefficient?
The mission is bad.
This agency sets its own budget, is perversely cut off from congressional oversight, and, accordingly, has been able to run wild. One of its strokes of genius: treating video games as bank accounts, giving itself permission to do so with a quaint doctrine of “dormant authority.”
Now we have oversight. Internal. “The calls are coming from inside the house”; it’s being gutted from within.
RedStateexpressed hope the CFPB’s “hyperaggressive regulation-writing and legal thuggery will be markedly reduced” and that the agency may even be closed.
On March 3, 1924, the 407-year-old Islamic caliphate collapsed when Caliph Abdülmecid II of the Ottoman Caliphate was deposed. The last remnant of the old regime gave way to the reformer Kemal Atatürk.
Protesters, caught up in the cause of continuing government waste, fraud and abuse, protest outside the Space X facility in Hawthorne, California. Cuz Elon Musk. Musk denies that DOGE is in any way radical. It is, he says, “common sense.”
“Trump has said the nation, facing $36 trillion in debt, must cut federal spending,” explains the Los Angeles Daily News today.
DOGE protests are also taking place at Tesla dealerships across the country.
“Cuts to the Department of Education are hitting the highly valued Nation’s Report Card,” writes Lexi Lonas Cochran, today, “even as sirens blare on student test scores.”
The 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was recently canceled, and the top official in charge of it was put on leave, leading advocates to doubt a promise from the Department of Education that NAEP would not be affected by the cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Educational experts like the testing system, but admit that in both reading and math, “the gaps between the lowest-performing and highest-performing students are still growing.”
Obviously government schooling is failing, bureaucrats are most concerned about testing, and DOGE’s cuts alarm them.
Meanwhile, CNBC has probably found an effective way to spread unease, maybe even panic: “Social Security has never missed a payment. DOGE actions threaten ‘interruption of benefits,’ ex-agency head says.” Or so says the headline.
Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known & seldom welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. Error indeed has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper & sufficient antagonist to error.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson : 1816–1826(1899) edited by Paul Leicester Ford, v. 2, p. 102.
As the Democratic machine was consolidating its support around Joe Biden on March 2, 2020, in his (ultimately successful) bid for the presidency, the man himself was showing his level of eloquence with a speech in which he demonstrated some trouble regurgitating the most memorable words from the Declaration of Independence:
It’s time for America to get back up on its feet and once again fight for the proposition that “We hold these truths to be self-evident”! Sounds corny; not a joke: think about it. We hold these truths to be self[la]-evident. All men and women created, by the, go, you know, you know the thing! You know how we talk about it.
Americans revel in quadrennial presidential debates and arguments made by talking heads on TV, but many, many people were made deeply uncomfortable by the public tiff broadcast from the White House between Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, on one side, and the President and Vice President of the United States on the other:
We might wish to ask ourselves — why?
CNN’s characterization of it was interesting:
A remarkable shouting match broke out in the Oval Office on Friday between President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, who was hoping to appeal to the US for continued security assistance during his trip to Washington. Raising their voices, Trump and Zelensky — along with the Vice President JD Vance — engaged in a tense back-and-forth about the nature of US support, and whether Zelensky had demonstrated enough gratitude.
But the “shouting match” was figurative, not literal. No one shouted, exactly. But voices were raised as Zelensky and Trump talked over each other. Someone was being impolite in that.
People unused to conflict that is demonstrated politely, and then devolves into a debate about manners, tend to think that all public meetings should be “nice.”
Not when war is the subject matter, perhaps.
In this case, Zelensky made his appeal in public, in a “nice” public setting, and the American leaders, Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, rose, ahem, to the occasion.
They have been called bullies for this, on TV and in social media. Perhaps it is the repeatedyou should be more thankful line that really galls.
But is Trump right? Is Zelinsky “gambling with World War III”?
Or is it Mr. Trump who gambles with WWIII? The U.S. siding with Russia after invading Ukraine might embolden further aggression by Russia or other authoritarian regimes (read: China).
Whether shouting or not, it was a tad tense. Tellingly, Trump defended the fracas. “But you see, I think it’s good for the American people to see what’s going on.”
I think that email was best interpreted as a performance review — but actually it was a pulse check review. “Do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse and two neurons?” So if you have a pulse and two neurons you can reply to an email. This is, I think, not a high bar, is what I’m saying.
Anyone could accomplish this.
But what we are trying to get to the bottom of is: we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why the can’t respond. And some people who are not real people. Like they’re literally fictional individuals.
Elon Musk, about his DOGE request of all federal government employees to respond to the email with five things they accomplished during the week. Accessed on The Rubin Report, February 27, 2025.
