Programming note: Join me tonight for the latest episode of our current Tale for Our Time - Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, a piece of speculative fiction from 1907 on the world of the early twenty-first century.
~On last week's Clubland Q&A, I remarked en passant that almost everything connected with the Government of the United States turns out to be a racket, and it might be quicker for Elon Musk just to listen the seven things that aren't a racket. And several commenters protested that seven was a gross-overestimate of the non-racket component. After the weekend's revelations, I am inclined to agree with them.
Just as a f'rinstance, USAid funds nine out of ten media outlets in Ukraine, under the guise of supporting "independent journalism".
Hang on. If words mean anything, wouldn't the "independent" media in Ukraine be the tiny percentage that's not bankrolled by a single agency of one foreign government?
Whatever. It certainly hasn't done anything for what remains of the Ukrainian population.
Speaking of which, you see that unprepossessing building at top right? That would be 876 7th Street, Arcata, California 95521, Between them, USAid and the State Department have sluiced just shy of half-a-billion bucks of taxpayers' money through Number 876's corner suites ...atrium lobby ...executive gym ...er, stationary cupboard:
USAID (and State) funneled nearly half a billion dollars through this building which is at "876 7th St Arcata, CA 95521-6358". The IRS and IN government contracts list this address as the current registered address for IN although it was clearly abandoned by December 2024. Shot... pic.twitter.com/ELzv3G4p5l
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 8, 2025
Don't try that at home, boys and girls. If you were laundering half-a-bil through an oversized storage locker at 927b No-Name Office Park, you could expect a dawn raid from the IRS SWAT team.
"Internews" sounds like Best Runner-Up in Nigeria's prestigious Least Convincing Name for a Corporate Scam competition. It's a 501(c)3, of course - that's what other countries call a "registered charity" - that receives ninety-five per cent of its funding from US taxpayers. Jeanne Bourgault, its president, pulls down 450 grand in salary, because "non-profits" are where the big bucks are, and 876 7th Street is so on the up-and-up that it's listed with the California Secretary of State as "her" office. But it doesn't appear to be attended terribly often by Ms Bourgault - a good friend of Bill and Hillary and their African diarrheapalooza, and also a pal of Klaus Schwab, at whose Spectre board meeting last year she called for worldwide implementation of advertisers' "exclusion lists" to crack down on peddlers of "misinformation". Besides, if you're on the take from USAid, what do you need advertising for?
The front door to Internews is open in our picture because Ms Bourgault's office is now apparently abandoned. So, if you live in Arcata, it might be worth swinging by just on the off-chance the half-billion got left in the petty cash drawer, in small bills.
Incidentally, even in America, can you really be a "Non-Governmental Organisation" when all your money comes from one government agency?
Thirty years ago, Jeanne Bourgault was whiling away the Clinton Administration working out of the US Embassy in Moscow. Then she transitioned to USAid for six years. Then she transitioned to being a recipient of USAid largesse. And in recent days she's transitioned to frantically scrubbing her bio from the "Clinton Global Initiative" and various other websites.
The real divide in America is not between urban and rural, red states and blue, middle-class and lower, but between those in on the racket and those excluded from it. The former includes Fauci, Thoroughly Modern Milley, diarrhea queen Chelsea Clinton, Bill Kristol, Politico, Jeanne Bourgault and others. The latter group includes you and your kids.
Oh, did I mention that the former group also includes Islamic terrorists? For the first decade or so of this century, Anwar al-Awlaki made regular cameo appearances at this website:
Major Hasan sent fortnightly emails to Anwar al-Awlaki, sometime spiritual adviser to both the Fort Hood shooter and three of the 9/11 terrorists and an imam so radical he's banned from Britain, a land with an otherwise all but boundless tolerance for radical imams.
Why was the vast bloated "intelligence community" so relaxed about Major Hasan chit-chatting with Mr Awlaki? Ah, well...
You'll recall that when Major Hasan, the Fort Hood mass murderer, was discovered by two US intelligence agencies to be emailing with Mr al-Awlaki, they both concluded there was no need to worry because this lively correspondence was also consistent with his 'research interests'.
Anwar al-Awlaki seems to be consistent with roughly half the planet's "research interests". It's not just US Army psychiatrists, but also gas engineers in the English Midlands. In Northamptonshire, Muhammad Khan of Wellingborough went to his local copy shop and asked them to print fifty copies of Mr Awlaki's book, Forty-Four Ways to Support Jihad. Feeling a little queasy, the staff waited till he'd left and then reported him to the coppers. Happily, Northamptonshire Constabulary accepted Mr Khan's explanation that he was interested in forty-four ways to support jihad "as a student and researcher" - as no doubt many of his fellow gas engineers are.
And whaddaya know? It turns out that, like Bill Kristol, Politico and Jeanne Bourgault, Anwar al-Awlaki was brought to us by US taxpayers:
*FLASHBACK/NEW CONTEXT*
USAID provided "full funding" for future terrorist Anwar Aulaqi to attend college in CO. Big lie-he was born in the US not Yemen. @C__Herridge and I reported on this extensively with my team @FoxNewsFOIA originally obtained by Intelwire pic.twitter.com/ypm9brPY07
— Pamela Browne (@browne_pamela) February 8, 2025
Mr Awlaki was born not in the Yemeni capital but in Las Cruces - which means that, had he blown up the Hoover Dam, the media would have reported the perp as a "New Mexico man". Yet USAid paid in full for him to attend college in Colorado as a "foreign exchange student". Did USAid also pay for his post-CSU training with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan?
Poor Mr Awlaki was subsequently droned by Obama, prompting complaints from Rand Paul and others about the unconstitutional droning of US citizens. But who knows? Maybe Barack just decided to off him before the Las Cruces boy's cunning reverse-birther status leaked out.
It's crap all the way down: crap-crap-crappity-crap. If you're wondering how a basic error such as listing your birthplace in San'aa, Yemen rather than in New Mexico was not detected by the world's most lavishly funded government, well, as we also learned this weekend, unlimited numbers of people can use the same Social Security number without the system flagging it:
That's exactly what he's saying, and there are massive ID theft problems because of this — mostly as a result of illegal immigrants stealing social security numbers to get jobs. https://t.co/G3jUTKLww5 https://t.co/ikhJX493TW
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) February 9, 2025
That happens to suit both the open-borders left and the Chamber of Commerce right. It's a Uniparty thing. The latter certainly don't want to have to reduce their profit margins by having to hire American citizens and pay them market wages. That's crazy talk, and no CEO wants to wind up working out of 876 7th Street for real.
If you're wondering how you get to be the broke-brokey-brokiest nation in human history, this is it. I would be in favour of Trump signing an executive order temporarily limiting federal expenditures to two hundred bucks a week, which would easily cover the outlays that are neither corrupt nor incompetent.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with my column on Trump's restoration of the America Alone thesis. My weekly music show offered a song for the season, a song for Mata Hari, and songs for the first concept album. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date was Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison in The Ghost and Mrs Muir, and our Sunday Song of the Week celebrated a ballad of domestic contentment. Our marquee presentation was our current Tale for Our Time - Robert Hugh Benson's extraordinarily prescient Lord of the World: Click for Part Twenty-Two, Part Twenty-Three and Part Twenty-Four. Part Twenty-Five airs tonight at SteynOnline.
If you were too busy this weekend running a billion-dollar business out of your rec room, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We're thrilled by all those across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. We have quite a bit of fun in The Mark Steyn Club, with audio adventures, video poems, planet-wide Q&As, and much more (heart attacks permitting). We appreciate the Club is not to everyone's taste, but, if you're minded to give it a go, either for a full year or a three-month experimental period, we'd love to have you. You can find more details on The Mark Steyn Club here - and, if you've a loved one who'd like something a little different for his or her birthday, don't forget our special Gift Membership.