Latest news with #AmericanEmpire
The Age
2 days ago
- Business
- The Age
‘Someone needs to punch the bully': What it will take to save the American Empire from ruin
The Big Short author Michael Lewis is, as one interviewer put it recently, 'a kind of guru of our age'. He has, after all, chronicled some of the big social and economic sea changes of our time – and, in the case of Donald Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE saga, he even seems to anticipate the sea changes. Speaking with Samantha Selinger-Morris on The Morning Edition podcast, Lewis discusses the catastrophic risks that could come from decimating the US federal government, and whether he thinks Trump's presidency will be the end of the American Empire. Click the player or watch the video below to listen to the full episode, or read on for an edited extract of the conversation. Selinger-Morris: I have to start by asking you what civil servants in the American federal government actually do, and what is the risk if they're fired… your latest book was actually mostly written last year before Trump returned to office. It seemed to predict Musk's gutting of the federal workforce. So what happens if they're fired? Lewis: Well, it depends on which ones you fire, but for starters, if you think about the federal government, there are several frames that are useful, but one is, it just manages a portfolio of risks and problems that the free markets don't want to manage or deal with, and it's all the hardest problems... everything from like, how you keep nuclear weapons from exploding when they shouldn't, to cleaning up horrible waste to forecasting hurricanes. Loading If you move from agency to agency in the US federal government, inside each one, you will find spine-tingling risks being dealt with and the way they've gone about... supposedly addressing the waste, fraud and abuse that they say existed in the government, was just to cut arbitrarily, whoever they could, rather than subjecting them to any kind of relevancy test or competency test. And so God knows what happens... It's very hard to predict where this leads. Selinger-Morris: So in your estimation, does that mean the United States is perhaps closer to experiencing another pandemic or a nuclear accident now than, say, before all of these DOGE cuts? Lewis: Of course. Yes. All of the above. Name your risk. I don't think there's a single risk it's less likely to have to deal with.
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Someone needs to punch the bully': What it will take to save the American Empire from ruin
The Big Short author Michael Lewis is, as one interviewer put it recently, 'a kind of guru of our age'. He has, after all, chronicled some of the big social and economic sea changes of our time – and, in the case of Donald Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE saga, he even seems to anticipate the sea changes. Speaking with Samantha Selinger-Morris on The Morning Edition podcast, Lewis discusses the catastrophic risks that could come from decimating the US federal government, and whether he thinks Trump's presidency will be the end of the American Empire. Click the player or watch the video below to listen to the full episode, or read on for an edited extract of the conversation. Selinger-Morris: I have to start by asking you what civil servants in the American federal government actually do, and what is the risk if they're fired… your latest book was actually mostly written last year before Trump returned to office. It seemed to predict Musk's gutting of the federal workforce. So what happens if they're fired? Lewis: Well, it depends on which ones you fire, but for starters, if you think about the federal government, there are several frames that are useful, but one is, it just manages a portfolio of risks and problems that the free markets don't want to manage or deal with, and it's all the hardest problems... everything from like, how you keep nuclear weapons from exploding when they shouldn't, to cleaning up horrible waste to forecasting hurricanes. Loading If you move from agency to agency in the US federal government, inside each one, you will find spine-tingling risks being dealt with and the way they've gone about... supposedly addressing the waste, fraud and abuse that they say existed in the government, was just to cut arbitrarily, whoever they could, rather than subjecting them to any kind of relevancy test or competency test. And so God knows what happens... It's very hard to predict where this leads. Selinger-Morris: So in your estimation, does that mean the United States is perhaps closer to experiencing another pandemic or a nuclear accident now than, say, before all of these DOGE cuts? Lewis: Of course. Yes. All of the above. Name your risk. I don't think there's a single risk it's less likely to have to deal with.
Telegraph
24-02-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Even a ‘literal communist' like Ash Sarkar knows the Left is in crisis
'WHO FUNDS YOU?' This has been the deathly cry of every angry online Leftist over the last few years. These detectives of 'dirty money' will harangue anyone who works at a think-tank or media outlet that deviates even a tad from the suffocating woke consensus. 'Who's paying you to say this?', they madly wail. That's how conceited the Left is: they're so flabbergasted that anyone would dare to defy their holy writ that they assume we must have been put up to it by some filthy-rich troublemaker. Now, in a turn of events that is as delicious as it is eye-opening, we're finally discovering who's funding them – none other than the American Empire. It is such a fun spectacle – many of the institutions loved by the Lefties who yell 'Who funds you?' were getting funding from the mighty machine of America's Deep State. Donald Trump's raiding of the coffers of USAID – the United States Agency for International Development – has exposed just how much of the woke industrial complex was backed by America. The BBC was getting US government funding. The digital liberal outlet Politico pocketed a sweet $8m in subscriptions paid for by the US state. Rory Stewart's wife's charity was funded too. And now we discover that Stonewall, Britain's best-known LGBTQ+ charity, received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American bureaucracy. This morning, it was reported that Stonewall might have to lay off half of its 114-strong workforce. And the reason, it seems, is because Trump has tightened America's purse strings. Stonewall appears to have received oodles of money from America's Global Equality Fund. It was reportedly for Stonewall's work in Eastern Europe, where it has been working with police and other state agencies on 'adapting their systems' to make them 'more sensitive to the needs of the LGBTQ+ community'. Stonewall staff are said to be 'shellshocked' by the cuts that will have to be made following Trump's puncturing of the bloated American state. I bet they're not nearly as shocked as the rest of us are to discover that a hyper-woke UK charity was being part-funded by a foreign government. Stonewall has lost the plot in recent years. It started life with the noble goal of winning gay equality, but ended up drowning in the alphabet soup of LGBTQIA etc. It became Britain's chief proponent of the hocus pocus of the trans ideology. For a very pretty penny, it offered its services to government bodies, universities and other institutions, feeding them such 21st-century hoo-hah as 'men can become women' and all bathrooms should be 'gender neutral'. Thankfully, many government departments cut ties with Stonewall in recent years, after clocking how nutty its agenda had become. It is shocking to me that a charity scorned by its own government continued to get money from the American government. It has a whiff of foreign intervention. To my mind, Stonewall and the others who got US cash were essentially the shock troops of America's woke colonialism. The ideology of political correctness really is in trouble. Even woke commentators like Ash Sarkar can see it. She's currently promoting her new book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War. Woke is dead, she says. And identity politics has been a 'disaster' for the Left. The Left, she says, has lost the argument to the 'hard-Right'. Eh? That's not what has happened at all. In truth, ordinary people are tired of the eccentric ideologies of their supposed betters. From the millions of working-class Americans who voted Trump to Britain's own trans-sceptical brigade, there's been a mass pushback against the divisive, destructive creeds of old. Older Empires gave the 'uncivilised' world the Bible and common law. The New Empire gave them the religion of gender fluidity and woke correct-speak. The US government spent millions on globalising wokeness. It funded a trans comic book in Peru, an 'equality' musical in Ireland, LGBT activism in Guatemala. And the woke ideologues of Stonewall. One of the reasons Stonewall's influence in the UK dipped in recent years is because of the brilliant work of gender-critical feminists. They shone a harsh light on the gender insanity it was foisting on government departments. It makes me proud that these plucky, self-funded women humbled a vast charity that was in the pay of the American state. A very British revolt against the woke industrial complex. TERF Island 1, American Empire 0. Woke really is dying, but the culprit isn't the 'hard-Right' – it's everyday men and women who want common sense back.
