Governments have so corrupted money that we forget that sound money, by providing both fungibility and privacy, has been a defense against overreaching governments. While sound money is in the interests of citizens, governments have managed to destroy it.

Hollywood took a turn for the worse in the wake of the George Floyd riots. Not only did Cancel Culture ramp up but select programs were memory-holed for their “problematic” content. Case in point: Tina Fey approved the removal of four “30 Rock” episodes with black face-adjacent gags. Warning labels suddenly graced beloved films, from “Dumbo” to “Goodfellas.” Comedians had to watch what they said or risk career repercussions. The most shocking nod to diversity at all costs? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made Best Picture nominees adapt to woke bylaws … or else.   The Oscars has “inclusivity rules” in order to qualify for Best Picture 2024 Films must make “underrepresented” groups 30% of the cast, the main actors, or the plot of the entire storyline pic.twitter.com/00FtFeJ7fU — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 18, 2023   Films needed to hire diverse crews, tell stories about underrepresented groups or otherwise align with woke ideology to qualify for the industry’s biggest honor. Some prominent films haven’t made the cut. The worst part? Artists remained silent on the measure, save Richard Dreyfuss. The Oscar winner said the diversity mandates made him want to vomit. Now, the Trump administration might take a stand on the punitive measures. The Washington Examiner reports that those Oscar rules may go the way of the 8-track tape. President Donald Trump’s top civil rights adviser [Harmeet K. Dhillon] said she was open to digging into the Academy’s 2020 quota requirements, suggesting that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would take the lead. The bipartisan Judicial Watch spurred Dhillon’s comments, contesting the way Best Picture winners are chosen within Hollywood. The Trump administration has made significant strides in attacking DEI-style measures across the country. That includes universities that use race in their recruitment measures. It wouldn’t be the first time Team Trump addressed Tinsel Town’s woes. President Trump recruited Hollywood legends like Jon Voight earlier this year to suggest ways to help the film industry. The issue has some bipartisan support. California is scrambling to beef up tax incentives to lure more productions back to the greater Los Angeles area.

G.K. Chesterton’s classic Father Brown story “The Sign of the Broken Sword” takes place during a fictional 19th-century military conflict between Britain and Brazil. General St. Clare commanded 800 British infantry in a campaign against the Brazilian general Olivier, a charismatic and generous enemy. St. Clare led two or three British regiments in a reckless assault on Brazilian positions, during which his troops suffered heavy casualties and had to surrender. Olivier paroled his prisoners, but soon after, St. Clare was found hanging from a tree, his broken sword around his neck.

Years later, Father Brown reveals that St. Clare, in the course of his military career in India and Africa, engaged in torture, fornication, and corruption, and ultimately sold England’s military secrets to the Brazilians. Major Murray, one of St. Clare’s officers, uncovered the treason and demanded St. Clare resign. St. Clare murdered him, the point of the general’s sword breaking off in the major’s body. Coldly calculating, St. Clare ordered a doomed assault, making “a hill of corpses to cover this one.” The surviving British troops are led by Captain Keith, who deduced the truth and lynched St. Clare as soon as the Brazilians departed.1

Is it not the case that Israel is doing the exact opposite of St. Clare: focusing on one (or some—Hamas) to cover the hill of corpses (Palestinians)? No, the Israeli government is doing what St. Clare was doing, although with an important shift. It is making a hill of corpses among the Palestinians to cover one corpse—which one? Here comes the surprise: the corpse of Jewish identity. With the majority of Jews in Israel caught in the genocidal grip, they are, in some basic sense, committing collective suicide, abandoning the spiritual greatness that once characterized their identity. And is Trump not doing the same? His corpse is the corpse of American freedom and democracy… When I write this, I can already hear “Leftist” voices shouting back at me: but were Western “freedom and democracy” not a hypocritical fake from the beginning? Is what is happening now not just their truth coming out? I think this is a simplification which, if we act upon it, can cost us dearly.

Our basic moral edifice is not just hypocritical (as it always already was); with the Gaza war, it has lost even the hypocritical force of appearance—in it and with it, appearance effectively becomes just an appearance, no longer an appearance which contains its own truth. Along these lines, Arundhati Roy remarked more than a year ago that, if the Gaza bombing goes on, then “the moral architecture of western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical, we know. But even that provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.”2 Crucial here is the idea that, in spite of its hypocrisy (or, why not, because of it and through it), the liberal moral edifice nonetheless “provided some sort of shelter.”

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I’m sure DOGE will have a long history as the textbook definition of overpromising and underdelivering. There were a lot of reasons to be skeptical of their chances to meet their goals. But I just want to focus on simple realities DOGE didn’t – and couldn’t – alter.

In 2024, federal spending was $6.8 trillion. Of that $6.8 trillion, $4.1 trillion was so-called mandatory spending – spending on programs that is baked into existing law. Over $3 trillion of that $4.1 trillion went to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Now, there is no doubt fraud and abuse in each of these programs. But even if DOGE could have perfectly cut out 100% of that fraud, it wouldn’t have added up to much in the face of that $3 trillion. And the people of DOGE simply lacked the institutional knowledge needed to accurately identify a lot of what was or wasn’t fraud or waste. In any system, there will always be things that to an outsider look as though they are striking and dramatic anomalies, but actually have a perfectly mundane explanation. Much of Elon Musk’s early, dramatic statements like making claims about there being more active Social Security accounts than the total American population were just examples of him confusing himself by not understanding the basics. So their flurry of activity into mandatory spending was never a promising avenue.

Interest on the debt, while not technically mandatory in the sense defined above, isn’t exactly optional either, unless policymakers are thinking the United States needs another reduction in its credit rating. That interest accounted for another $900 billion in the 2024 budget.

That leaves a total of $1.8 trillion in so-called discretionary spending. The full military budget for operations, maintenance, servicemember pay, and all the rest, accounts for a little less than half of the discretionary budget. As for the remaining half of discretionary spending – you can just look at the infographic linked above and see how that half is divvied up. While discretionary spending might seem like the easiest to go after, the simple fact is that even huge cuts to this area aren’t going to do much to dent the deficit. For example, every now and then you see a news story about how millions dollars of taxpayer money was used on some comically absurd sounding study, like whether or not the mating behavior of clownfish is altered if they are shown video footage of circus clowns or whatever. (To be clear, that is an entirely imaginary study I invented for comic effect, and not something that was ever done, let alone funded with taxpayer money. (I hope.)) And this news story will become everyone’s favorite example about wasteful government spending for a while. But science, space, and technology as a combined category makes up only $41 billion in total – only about 2% of discretionary spending, and about 0.6% of the federal budget. Get rid of the funding for that clownfish study and a thousand more like it, and you still haven’t made a dent in the deficit. It’s a good move if you want to create flashy headlines and maximize your media coverage. But if you’re serious about fixing the deficit, going after the clownfish studies doesn’t even make the top 100 list of priorities.

To make a serious dent in the federal deficit will require serious reductions in mandatory spending, which makes up the bulk of federal spending. Anyone who says they want to reduce federal spending but won’t talk about making serious changes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and military spending is at a nonstarter from the beginning. These are all very popular programs. Silly studies about clownfish make much easier targets. Any politician who wants to seriously address federal spending should focus on the former. But a politician whose top priority is getting reelected will spend most of their time talking about the latter.

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