Democrat concern about unelected bureaucrat destroying America (02-12-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepeatcalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] So this wisdom comes to us from Jarvis on the Twitter machine, Jarvis Best, who says, in the old days, see, we used to have something called the spoils system. The spoils system. To the victor go, the spoils, right? The spoils system, where the president would appoint party loyalists to government jobs. So a Republican president would appoint Republicans to run the government. And then if a Democrat won, the Democrat would appoint party loyalists to government jobs.

[00:00:59] And this was considered inefficient. And this was considered inefficient because you had to change all of the government jobs whenever there was a new party in charge. So in the late 1800s, they replaced the spoils system with the career civil servant system, which ensured that no matter which party was in the White House, the federal government would always be run by Democrats.

[00:01:23] Democrats. See, so that's what's going on here. Yes. That encapsulates all the guff that we are seeing surrounding Doge and Elon Musk.

[00:01:41] And I watched the well on the way home. Actually, I was driving home and I was listening to Brett Winterble and he was joining live in progress. The the press availability that Elon Musk and Donald Trump held in the Oval Office.

[00:02:00] And I was listening to Brett. And I was listening to Brett. And I watched the press availability. I don't really call it. It wasn't really a news conference, although they did take a couple of questions.

[00:02:27] Sometimes they call this a gaggle where a bunch of reporters, they just, you know, bring them all into the room and they throw a bunch of questions and stuff. And I got to tell you, just watching that availability, that that event.

[00:02:45] It really is amazing. If you just stop and think for a moment and look at the individuals, you know, set aside the orange man bad, set aside the rocket man bad. Set all that stuff aside, whatever you think about the individuals and just see them for, you know, these two business guys that are in the Oval Office.

[00:03:13] And are telling you that they are applying basic accounting protocols to the government books and they have uncovered what could very well be somewhere in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars in waste, fraud and abuse.

[00:03:35] By simply coding, by putting codes in the general ledger, in the GL, right? Using GL codes. This is something that every business knows. This is something that most people who do their home budgets know. You got to know what the expense is for. You have to have a category for it. So that allows you to track where the money is going.

[00:04:01] Most banks offer this type of categorization so you can run a report on your credit card, on your debit card, your checking account, savings account, whatever it may be. Most banks offer this for free. OK, like you can and they have little graphics, pie chart stuff so you can follow your money.

[00:04:25] And what you are doing when you are balancing a checkbook, reconciling records, when you're doing that kind of stuff, that's essentially kind of like a little bit of an audit. You're auditing your finances to make sure that there aren't any kind of crazy expenditures going out the door. Right. I didn't approve this purchase. What is this expense for? Why am I in debt this month? And that's how you identify those things.

[00:04:54] And we're not even doing those things at the government level. It's astounding. And you see these two guys up there coming out of the world of business. They understand how this stuff is supposed to look. And they're shocked. At how little of it is actually done.

[00:05:15] So we also had this morning the there was a House Oversight Subcommittee on the DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency DOGE. And. Have we determined whether the G is a sound? Are we going with DOGE or are we going with DOGE? Is it more of a harder like a J sound? Is it like a GZE or J? I don't know.

[00:05:45] DOGE or DOGE? I kind of like DOGE. Or DOGE. It could be that. It could be DOGE. And then that works in like a whole bunch of. Like sound bites from the DOGE ball movie. Which could be fun. But I digress. So they have this. This committee meeting. And. I caught a little bit of it. I didn't get to watch the whole thing. And you know I'm going to be honest. I'm probably not going to go back and watch the whole thing. Although I kind of feel like I should. It only ran about two hours.

[00:06:14] So maybe I will. Maybe I'll watch some of it. But I caught the final comments that were made here by Brandon Gill. And Brandon Gill is a Republican out of Florida. And he spoke last before they did their closing comments. The ranking member Democrat and the chairs Marjorie Taylor Greene. I did not get to hear her final comments.

[00:06:44] But he kind of gave a summation of what the arguments have been from the Democrats so far. And he says it's all about Elon Musk. And this has been my observation as well. All of these attacks about what Doge is doing. Is about Elon Musk. And his lack of accountability. And who. He's an unelected bureaucrat. He's.

[00:07:10] Okay well all of the people that Elon Musk is identifying in these agencies. They're all unelected bureaucrats too. He called them. The fourth branch of government. It's an unelected. Unaccountable. Bureaucratic branch of government. And he's exactly right. And by the way. For non-conservatives. You may not be aware. But conservatives have been identifying this problem for a very long time.

[00:07:39] I've been talking about it for 20 years. They've been called all sorts of things from the you know the managerial class. The administrative state. The deep state. The new state. There's all these different terms from the new state came out of the Soviet Union. That's what they called them. Or the new class I should say. The new class. So. You hire in all of these bureaucrat. Technocrats. Whatever. They're not elected. You can't get rid of them.

[00:08:07] And over time they've become more and more empowered. To essentially write law. Via regulation. Via the regulatory regimes. That presidents put in place. Little of this stuff. Is governed anymore by you know congressional action. Because Congress realized a long time ago that. Hey we could get paid. And not really do anything except make speeches that go viral. Like.

[00:08:36] That's a way easier gig. We're basically social media influencers at this point. And they don't have to do the hard work. Of legislating. They don't have to go to all the committee meetings. And you see it. You saw it today. In this doge oversight meeting. Where a Democrat would walk in. Make a speech for five minutes. And then leave. They have no interest. In actually hearing any of the testimony. From the witnesses that were there. And so they've allowed this to occur.

[00:09:05] Or they have allowed the expansion of the executive branch. And living underneath that. This bureaucratic branch. And that's what Musk and Trump are getting at. I am very excited. I'm very happy. As one who was not a fan of Donald Trump. In his first run. I am very happy with this approach. With this focus. It's necessary. It is costing us hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

[00:09:35] And if we can get this under control. We could see. A massive. Amount of economic benefit. All right. If you're listening to this show. You know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do too. And you probably heard me say. Get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well because it's how you detect media bias. Which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app. And it's a website.

[00:10:03] And it combines news from around the world in one place. So you can compare coverage. And verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.news. Slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using Ground News a few months ago. And more recently. Chose to work with them as an affiliate. Because it lets me see clearly. How stories get covered. And by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself.

[00:10:31] Check.ground.news. Slash Pete. Subscribe through that link. And you'll get 15% off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast. But it also supports Ground News. As they make the media landscape more transparent. So the House Oversight Committee. It's a subcommittee of that oversight committee. Looking into Doge. Dog. Doggie.

[00:11:02] And at the very end. This fellow Brandon Gill. Gave a sort of wrap up of what we have seen. Over the course of the two hours. And I did catch this as it was occurring live. And so I paused it on the C-SPAN page. And we'll see if it loads up. And if it does. I think you'll be very interested to hear it. Otherwise it's going to be kind of awkward while I search for it. Thank you. Madam Chair. And thank you for hosting this committee. If we've learned anything so far.

[00:11:31] It's that Republicans want to cut waste, fraud and abuse from our federal government. And save taxpayer dollars. And Democrats want a grandstand. And play politics. We can see right now even. Of the six Democrats on this committee. Only one can even be bothered to stay for the duration of this hearing. All we've heard about for most of this hearing from the other side of the aisle is Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Elon Musk.

[00:12:00] Unelected bureaucrat. And I'd like to ask if Democrats really care about unelected bureaucrats making decisions over our lives. Where were they whenever their god Anthony Fauci was forcing vaccine and mask mandates on the American people for four years? Boom. During the COVID crisis.

[00:12:22] Where were they whenever unelected Alejandro Mayorkas was facilitating the invasion of our country by illegal aliens who were murdering and raping and pillaging our people? Boom. Where were they whenever the Secretary of Education, unelected Cardona, targeted states and schools and people who were disagreed with his view of the radical left's transgender ideology?

[00:12:48] Where were they whenever Gary Gensler, former chairman of the SEC, also unelected, was lawlessly thwarting the development of financial markets, particularly in the crypto space, by lawlessly pursuing regulation via enforcement? They were nowhere to be seen because they don't care. Because all of those things benefited their side of the aisle at the expense of ours.

[00:13:14] And perhaps that's also why they don't seem to be very interested in rooting out improper payments from our federal government. If you wonder why so many people are cynical about American politics, this is it. This is exactly why. The reality is that Elon Musk serves as an employee of the president. And we were given a massive mandate to carry out what he's been doing.

[00:13:45] His job is to carry out the will of the American people as expressed through the executive. That's exactly how the Constitution is supposed to work. The Constitution did not create an unelected, unaccountable fourth branch of government in the administrative state. The American people know this. My colleague Brian Jack discussed some of the opinion polls recently.

[00:14:10] We are doing, and President Trump is doing, exactly what he was elected to do. And that's why he's polling at a 53% approval rating, higher than he was at any point during his first administration. Even Elon Musk and his Doge efforts now are polling at a 49% approval rating, which, just to point out, is 16 points higher than President Biden was polling at whenever he finished his term in office. Oof.

[00:14:41] That hurts. The Democrat Party has, for decades, systematically grown and weaponized the administrative state against the American people. And the American people have had enough of it. Right now we're talking about $2.7 trillion in improper payments since 2003. We're uncovering what could be the biggest money laundering scandal in American history.

[00:15:09] And the other side of the aisle could care less. They have no concern about where this money went, to what entities it went, to what governments, to what people or groups. Nothing. All they want to talk about is Elon Musk, incessantly. So it does make me wonder, if they don't care about where it's going, do they have an idea? Because what we've uncovered so far is that so much of the waste, fraud, and abuse of our federal government is actually funding their side of the aisle.

[00:15:39] It's funding media outlets that are running cover for Democrats routinely. The NPR, PBS, the BBC, Politico. It's going to fund left-wing NGOs that are facilitating the invasion of our country. It's going to fund left-wing transgender activism and sex changes all over the globe. This is money that's being used, taken from the American people, and used against their interests.

[00:16:10] If you care about rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, we should be serious about this. I'm very excited to be on this committee. I'm excited to expose what's being going on. Thank you, Madam Chair. And with that, I yield. All right, so that was Brandon Gill calling out the Democrats for what is obvious to all, right? That they do not care about rooting out the waste, fraud, and abuse.

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[00:17:56] There was a subcommittee meeting on the Doge and the ranking member of this subcommittee is Melanie Stansbury, who, as I understand it, is known for solving a lot of murders in her tiny little town up in the Northeast, I think. No, I'm kidding. She's a Democrat from New Mexico. She's the ranking member on this subcommittee.

[00:18:24] So you just heard Brandon Gill kind of outline the way this hearing has gone and the larger issues at play. And by the way, I agree with Congressman Gill on this, in case that wasn't clear, in case you're just joining in for the first time. I've been, you know, ripping through all of this Doge stuff and what they've been uncovering,

[00:18:49] because to me, like, this is a massive scandal that might even be bigger than the covering up of a mentally incapacitated president for four years. Right? So this is huge. And I'm still waiting for sort of the legacy media outlets, the people that care about the hardware that they want to win all the time, the Pulitzer this and, you know, national journalists that.

[00:19:17] Well, this is fertile ground. Fertile ground. You can actually. Oh, look out. You can actually take down. Is everybody okay over there? We good? No, no, you're fine. All right. I thought somebody took a keyboard, tried to make an escape. Now, I forgot what I was saying. This happens with my wife all the time. I mean, with me, too, my wife. Sorry.

[00:19:47] So Brandon Gill, he lays this out, that this has been a massive money laundering operation, basically. And then you've got the ranking member, Melanie Stansbury. And listen to what she speaks about at this hearing to wrap it up. Right. What she decides to use her time to talk about. In summation. I never thought so many conspiracy theories and wild accusations could be wound into one five minute speech.

[00:20:15] But I appreciate my friends across the aisle. First of all. So that's a slam on Gill, who was saying that you guys have been using this fourth branch of government, this unelected bureaucracy to essentially launder taxpayer money into your own pockets and the pockets of your allies. All in service of your leftist agenda.

[00:20:40] And when you look at the way this has been operating, that is quite obviously true. The NGOs that are getting all of this funding, they are not some these are not right wing organizations. Well, it's because right wingers don't care about that stuff. That's not true. The right funds their churches. And they don't do it through federal grants.

[00:21:05] And that's why, you know, and by the way, could you imagine if you tried to use federal grant money to espouse conservative political ideology? Of course not. But that's why nobody is surprised when they see Guatemalan drag shows and sex change operations and, you know, transgender dance performances and operas and comic books in Peru. Like nobody is surprised to see this stuff.

[00:21:34] It's never from the right. All this stuff is the left with their the pushing out of their political philosophy. And they've been getting government grants to do so. You don't imagine if the Heritage Foundation was listed as an awardee or a sub awardee on any of these grants. Imagine, imagine for a moment the amount of blood running through the streets due to all of the exploded lefty brains.

[00:22:04] It would be blood. There's going to be very little brain matter. I kid, I kid. Come on now. All right. So here she is. Let's talk about this massive mandate that supposedly brought Donald Trump into office. OK, hang on a second. It is supposedly not supposedly. There's no B in that word. It's supposedly, supposedly, supposedly, not supposedly. Not a word. Oh, my gosh, I'm so sick of this.

[00:22:33] And there's a member of Congress that just said it. But now she's going to she's going to use her time to close out the hearing to argue about whether or not Donald Trump had a mandate or not. Donald Trump did not run on putting an unelected billionaire in charge of dismantling the federal government. He ran on lowering prices for Americans. Hang on a second. OK, false and true.

[00:23:03] False in that Donald Trump did, in fact, do that. The plans for Doge were we've known about that for months before the election. Elon Musk was on the stage. They were talking about this stuff in the campaign rallies. Now, you guys never watched any of those rallies. Right. You put yourself in your little echo chamber and your little, you know, insulated bubble. So you never had to listen to any of those things.

[00:23:27] But Elon Musk and Donald Trump have been promising this very thing that the creation of the DOGE. Was done before Donald Trump won the election. This was he. What did he say? I am your retribution. That's what he said. That's what Donald Trump said. Talking about the deep state. Like, what the hell do you think he meant by the deep state? It's not just the intelligence community. It's the entire swamp.

[00:23:57] That goes back eight years. The guy's been talking about draining the swamp. Again, what did you think he was talking about? You. He's talking about you. Stansbury. He's talking about you. It's interesting. Oh, sorry. The true part was that he also did talk about lowering the prices of and the cost of living for Americans. He did talk about that, too.

[00:24:24] While we're sitting here this morning, the top of The New York Times is reporting that inflation has risen unexpectedly as food and energy prices have soared. What's going on, guys? I thought you were going to tackle inflation and food and energy prices. Oh, my God. In three weeks, lady? Are you an idiot? Okay, yes. She's probably an idiot. Holy smokes. This is what you're doing.

[00:24:52] You're relitigating campaign messaging. That's what you're saying. You said you were going to be lowering our egg prices and you didn't lower them yet. That's what she's saying. All right. I hope you had a happy holiday season, but tell me if something like this happened at your house. Your family and friends are gathered around. Maybe y'all are in the living room. You're laughing, swapping stories, reminiscing, and then somebody says, Hey, Dad, remember those old VHS tapes? Did you ever get them transferred?

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[00:25:50] And next year, instead of talking about those memories, imagine gathering the family to watch them together. Talk about a memorable gift. So do what I did. Trust the experts at Create a Video, conveniently located in Mint Hill, right off I-485, and online at createavideo.com. Let me jump over and get a quick call in here from Marty. Hello, Marty. Welcome to the program. Hello, Pete. Hey, how are you? Pretty good. I was going to comment a little bit on the does.

[00:26:20] You know, you watch these little demonstrations they're having. I guess it's in front of the Capitol building where the Democrats is out and, you know, just almost at the point of, you know, promoting insurrection or something themselves, you know, trying to, you know, put people in the streets fight and such things as that is what they're saying. But there's an old saying that, you know, if you throw a rock in a pack of dogs, the one that yelps is probably the guilty one. And they're yelping like crazy here, Pete.

[00:26:47] But I'm wondering, are they not trying to write versus what Trump and Musk is doing? Are they not trying to write a scary narrative to truth? I mean, you know, truth is that, yeah, we need to cut these things back. And they're trying to create a scary narrative that has nothing to do with truth. They're just trying to make people think that things are going to crumble and fall. Yes. Based on what Musk is doing. Correct. That is the that's the that's the strategy. I went over this, I think, yesterday.

[00:27:18] You can call it the poster child approach where it's like, oh, my gosh, look at here's the starving child in Africa. And that's what this program is doing. And yet way more money is going out the door to fund, you know, the the the transgender plays in in Morocco. Like, well, well, wait a minute. That's the thing you're highlighting as the thing that we need to fund and fix and help. Then why is more money getting spent on this other stuff? Right.

[00:27:44] So like that's or the Mott and Bailey approach, which is highlight the good things saying this is what we're funding and you're going to get rid of it. And everything's going to collapse if you keep doing this and all these people are going to die. But in fact, you're using the money for something else that's less defensible. Yeah, I think that's exactly what's going on. Marty, I appreciate the call. I want to get to the rest of this audio clip from Melanie Stansberry, who, by the way, just made a comment there about inflation.

[00:28:12] And how come you are not doing anything about inflation? Well, inflation isn't something that just happened in the last two and a half weeks or three weeks that Trump has been in office. Banchi, writer over at Red State, points out that this latest inflation news and the fact that inflation was still humming along since summer of 2024.

[00:28:40] He says there should be an investigation into why the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates right before the election. Because that's not what you would do. That's why they lowered the rates because they said inflation was cooling. Well, now it's not. You just you cut the rates. Inflation isn't. So did you do that to help Democrats win the election? The other thing.

[00:29:04] This is from Oilfield Rando, who actually has a website where he combs through all these grants and stuff called Rando Land. And he says a ton of the insane Biden administration funding was passed in a reconciliation bill. The preposterously named Inflation Reduction Act, which was the Inflation Creation Act, actually. There's no excuse for the GOP not using a reconciliation bill to cut it all.

[00:29:30] Any Republican who isn't on board is wetting their beak with the spending. In other words, taking advantage of it. Ron DeSantis then weighs in on that tweet and says anything Biden enacted via reconciliation, which only required 50 Senate votes, can be repealed via reconciliation. Republicans have 53 senators. They can save trillions of dollars by repealing Biden's profligate spending. There are no excuses. Back to Stansbury.

[00:30:00] Isn't that what the executive orders were supposed to do? Oh, wait. Or is dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion and our federal agencies and putting an ideological agenda and trying to fire the federal workforce, your actual agenda? Have you been too busy trying to actually address the fiscal health of this country? Because it's all of the above, lady. All of the above doing it all. It's not an either or. That is a false choice. She is offering me.

[00:30:29] The numbers are telling us that you have. So let's be real about what's going on here. I also want to point out that literally while we've been sitting here for the last almost two hours getting lectured on fiscal responsibility, literally the Republicans just released their plan to raise the debt limit while we were sitting here. And they want to raise it by four trillion dollars.

[00:30:57] Okay, guys, like literally. I'm just like without words. Oh, then you're in the wrong line of work. Oh, my gosh. That's not an argument. Republicans just unveiled a plan for a debt ceiling increase of four trillion dollars. Like, oh, my God, like, really? I can't believe it. That's not an argument. Not an argument. Here's an argument.

[00:31:22] The debt limit is to fund the things that have already been approved. See, so when you guys were in charge and you went on this tear and you spent all of this money, trillions of dollars that we didn't have that you borrowed. Right. Against future obligations. That's why you have to raise the debt limit, because you cannot afford to pay the bills that you've already committed to.

[00:31:48] So Republicans generally are not in favor of raising the debt limit. In fact, a lot of the shutdown fights have been over this very thing. It's been the Democrats that want to raise the debt limit because they want to keep spending. And if you don't do it, then you're going to shut down the government. That's their argument. That has been their argument. But now their argument has to be the complete opposite of what it was because. Orange man bad and Elon a billionaire.

[00:32:16] This is where this is what they are reduced to because they cannot argue the merits, the merits of these spending obligations, these programs and grants, this waste, fraud and abuse. They can't defend it. But they know that they're benefiting. And they know it's a loser of an argument for them. So they're going to talk about anything else they can. All right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast.

[00:32:45] So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepcalendorshow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening. And don't break anything while I'm gone.