The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Hydra of Government: How the Global Engagement Center Lives On Through Rebranding     The Global Engagement Center was defunded, only to reemerge under a new name—proof that bureaucracy rarely dies, it just rebrands. By   Roger Kimball January 5, 2025 If you visit the State Department’s   website for the Global Engagement Center , you will read that “The Global Engagement Center closed on December 23, 2024.” Not really. As has been often observed, the nearest thing to immortality this side of the pearly gates is a government initiative.   I have noted   in this space and elsewhere that the innocuous-sounding “Global Engagement Center” was actually (in   Vivek Ramaswamy’s accurate summary ) a “key node of the censorship industrial complex.” According to its mission statement, the GEC was supposed to be focused on “ foreign   state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, securi...

  MAGA in One Step By  Karen Kwiatkowski ok ocracy and elections.  It’s about getting something for nothing, always and necessarily from someone else’s pot. Electing an executive, who in turn spends trillions of borrowed and stolen money every year – mainly to buy the next election, enrich themselves and their allies, always unaccountable, always unauditable, always failing to deliver more freedom and more prosperity – why, that how it works, isn’t it? H.L. Mencken was correct in his assessment of democracy and elections.  It’s about getting something for nothing, always and necessarily from someone else’s pot. Electing an executive, who in turn spends trillions of borrowed and stolen money every year – mainly to buy the next election, enrich themselves and their allies, always unaccountable, always unauditable, always failing to deliver more freedom and more prosperity – why, that how it works, isn’t it? Trump, with no third term to game, and with a new and extraord...

Belfries Simplicius The systems of our control, we are led to believe, are necessary things. It is a topic I touched on in the recent article  Measures of Control .   We are taught that to question these systems is to undermine the very foundation beneath our feet. Similarly, the ‘leaders’ of our world have shaped the perception of their positions so as to bolster them with an aura of sanctity. In reality, research shows just how superfluous leaders of companies or institutions really are. “Leaders are often thought to be instrumental to the performance of the organizations they lead. However, considerable research suggests that their influence over organizational performance might actually be minimal. These claims of leader irrelevance pose a puzzle: If leaders are relatively insignificant, why would someone commit to leading?” - Source One example amongst several studies showing that the CEO of an organization is mostly a symbolic figurehead and pushes the needle much less t...