☕️ FREEDOM FRIED ☙ Tuesday, February 18, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Answering a tsunami of objections watering down the Social Security Zombie reveal; influential congressman and serious journalist start talking treason; and Europe is on the war mania chopping block.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! The roundup includes: yesterday the Swamp recoiled like a holy-watered vampire and hissed defenses about the Social Security scandal, so we must return to that subject to answer the objections; Representative Massie and serious investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger begin throwing around the “t” word; and Europe’s worst fears begin to manifest as Trump races toward world peace at light speed.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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I’ll begin with an apology. We must discuss Social Security a little more. The Deep State’s firefighting bots were out in force yesterday, desparately trying to extinguish the flames of righteous outrage kindled by DOGE’s Zombie Army disclosures.

The distraction that nearly everyone focused on was the threshold question of whether the Zombie Army (people older than 100+ lacking dates of death in the Social Security System) were still receiving direct Social Security payments. The simple answer is we don’t know for sure but it doesn’t matter. The almost-certainly deliberately over-complicated answer is the kind of thing that gives you a rage-induced migraine.

But we shall strain for clarity. Let’s begin with yesterday’s most cited sentence from the OIG’s 2023 Report:

Hecklers focused on the first highlighted sentence above, wherein the OIG apparently admitted the Agency assured him no direct SSA payments were being made to most of the 18.9. million in the 100+ cohort. Accepting that as true for argument’s sake, crater-sized holes remain.

For example, SSA said “almost none” currently receive SSA payments, which is not the same as none. The number of zombies having checks scattered over their gravesites remains unquantified. A better question is: do they even know? Or were they just guessing? If they did know how many there were —“almost none”— then they must also know who they were, and so they could stop the payments. But apparently not.

Or, for another example, how confident are they that deceased people under 100 aren’t still receiving payments? It was never studied.

🔥 But the totally ignored second highlighted sentence above explained why direct payments still don’t matter. As the OIG understatedly observed, “these (Zombie) SSNs could allow for a wide range of potential abuse.” The active SSNs, appearing valid in the system, enable fraudsters to apply for and receive a panoply federal, state, and local benefits, like PPP loans.

The OIG warned that nearly every other government agency uses the SSA database to stop improper payments to people who are, well, teats up.

The potential amount of misspent money staggers the imagination and far exceeds any amount to which dearly departed direct SSA payments might sum.

“Millions of deceased numberholders,” the OIG flatly explained, “could result in erroneous payments by other Federal benefit-paying agencies that use the DMF to detect inaccurate or unreported deaths.” The report continued, “it can also hinder private industry, as well as state and local governments’ ability to use the DMF to prevent identity fraud.”

Conspicuously absent from the OIG’s report was any mention of what is likely the real reason for all the bureaucratic snow-blindness: fraudulent voting. I don’t blame him for not mentioning that, either. His report would’ve never seen the light of day. They’ve probably have found him tied up in a sack on the sandy bottom of the Potomac River.

🔥 Doubters next decried that the problem was “fixed” in December 2023, when Congress ordered the SSA to report all the Zombies to the Treasury Department’s Do Not Pay portal. This is the sickest joke of all. Here’s where the OIG explained the then-upcoming “solution.”

Since the Treasury Department issues all federal payments, it has a critical gatekeeping role. It’s the final line of defense against waste, fraud, and abuse. And the diligent civil servants at Treasury had a high-tech solution: a database listing all the crooks, terrorists, known fraudsters, and Zombies, against which it diligently cross-referenced all outgoing payments to ensure that nobody who shouldn’t get our tax money “accidentally” does. That solution is called the “Do Not Pay Portal.”

There was only one Zombie-Army-sized problem.

According to DOGE engineers, Treasury never used the Do Not Pay list. Not once. Even though it had engineered its fancy portal and everything. Elon reported the news last week:

CLIP: Here’s Elon discussing problems in the Oval Office including the Do Not Pay failure (1:06). Obviously, if there weren’t significant waste, fraud, and abuse from the Zombie SSNs, Congress would not have ordered SSA to start using the Do Not Pay Portal. What nobody fully understood was that the bureaucracy is broken everywhere, with all our critical safeguards transformed into creaky points of failure.

(Update: On February 8th, Elon reported that, as a result of DOGE efforts, Treasury agreed to begin actually using the Do Not Pay list for its intended purpose: not paying bad actors. Unfortunately, this still does not fix the Zombie SSN problem.)

🔥 The argument remains: how significant is the cumulative waste, fraud, and abuse? Yesterday, people who, for whatever reason, defended the Zombie Army said, go back to sleep, it too small to worry about. Sigh. A lawyer’s work is never done. I now direct you to the General Accounting Office’s September 20, 2024 report titled, “Payment Integrity: Significant Improvements Are Needed to Address Improper Payments and Fraud.”

In its first full paragraph, GAO reported identifying $2.7 trillion dollars in improper payments since 2003. For the prior year (2023), it estimated $236 billion in improper payments. Those are just the ones they know about.

Don’t believe the psyoperators. The fraud is not insignificant— not according to GAO, which explicitly said, “Improper payments and fraud are long-standing and significant problems in the federal government.” Unsurprisingly, it gets worse every year as more crooks get in on the grift:

(The reason the trend bumps in 2021 is because that was the covid wheeeee free money for fraudsters year.)

The SSA deliberately refused to fix its Zombie Army problem because it was “too expensive” to fill in the empty Dates of Death—which all the other federal agencies use to stop improper payments. (SSA estimated a fix would have cost three million dollars.) SSA supposedly “fixed” the problem when it was ordered to report Zombies to the Do Not Pay list beginning December, 2023. But the Do Not Pay list was moribund.

And, it appears, some problem arose, because SSA did not, after all, begin reporting its Zombies to Do Not Pay. I’m still tracking this one down, but I found a recent bill in Congress that was still trying to order SSA to report their Zombies to Do Not Pay. (That bill died in committee.)

In related news, yesterday DOGE reported that Treasury has been omitting another critical requirement besides Do-Not-Pay: a field linking payments to a specific Congressional authorization. According to DOGE, up to $4.7 trillion of literally untraceable payments have gone out:

Among other potential problems, the ‘optional’ TAS field facilitated Deep State off-book payments and color-revolution slush funds. Thanks to DOGE, both the Do Not Pay and the TAS problems are now fixed.

I worry this issue is super-wonky, and that the sheer scale of the fraud numbs peoples’ brains and makes them feel like switching back to reruns of The Office on Netflix. As you can see, this horrifying problem has been studied for years, it just never made it into the public conversation. Thank goodness for DOGE.

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Independent investigative journalist Michael Shellenberg is a former Democrat and a former Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment.” He famously reported on the “Twitter Files” scandal. Now, he’s released a video report that non-ironically accused USAID of treason. It linked a previous tweet where Representative Thomas Massie concluded the exact same thing.

CLIP: Shellenberger levels treason charge on regime-change ‘humanitarian’ agency (7:35).

“The evidence suggests that USAID, along with the CIA, were behind the 2019 impeachment of Trump — an illegal regime change effort at home," Shellenberger explained. "The whistleblower who triggered the impeachment was a CIA analyst who was first brought into the White House by the Obama administration," he said.

In turn, “the CIA analyst relied on reporting by a ‘news’ organization called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which effectively operated as an arm of USAID.” The Deep State-funded OCCRP has “probably been responsible for five or six countries changing over from one government to another government … and getting prime ministers indicted or thrown out."

Cut-outs. CIA → USAID → OCCRP → CIA Whistleblower → Impeachment.

"As such,” Shellenberger concluded, “it appears that CIA, USAID, and OCCRP were all involved in the impeachment of President Trump in ways similar to the regime change operations that all three organizations engage in abroad.”

In other words, treason.

“It is highly illegal and even treasonous,” Shellenberger said, “for CIA, USAID, and its contractors and intermediaries, known as 'cut-outs,' to interfere in U.S. politics this way.”

The momentum is building. Can you feel it? Are arrests coming?

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Yesterday, CNN ran an unintentionally hilarious story headlined, “Barred from US-Russia talks on Ukraine, Europe scrambles for response with Paris summit.” Moving at lightspeed, Trump’s negotiating team will summit with Russia’s counterpart today in Saudi Arabia —far from the EU— to discuss the agenda for a face-to-face Trump-Putin confab there next week. So European elites are experiencing crippling levels of FOMO.

Trump didn’t pick them for his team. “European leaders, CNN advised, “have been sidelined at the start of a pivotal week for the continent’s security.” So they’re going to make their own team. They said fine, we’ll have our own emergency peace summit, one day before yours. Yesterday, the pampered politicians gathered in wintery Paris and took bold, decision action by talking, in seven languages, until reporters’ ears bled.

We might yet see a strongly worded letter. Not just yet. It’s too soon. But it could happen. However, you can count on stern glances, concerned nods, and possibly even a new hashtag or two.

Secretary of State Rubio will be joined in Riyadh today by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. The Kremlin said that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will be joined by presidential aide Yury Ushakov.

Sacrebleu! It’s the Europeans’ worst nightmare. “It’s no exaggeration to say this is the most serious crisis that the transatlantic alliance has ever faced,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a “senior fellow” at the Deep State’s Institute for Strategic Studies, without exaggeration. Think about that statement. The America-Russia peace summit is a more serious crisis than the entire Cold War, or even that dark hour when America literally erased France by re-labeling ‘freedom fries.’

What is becoming crystal clear is that Trump has done it again. He has forced the Europeans to occupy the least popular political position: demanding more war. They’re like that drunk guy at the dorm party insisting the music still isn’t loud enough while everyone else is begging for sleep. Meanwhile, the four superpowers —America, Russia, India, and China— are united in supporting peace, a commonsense proposition supported by nearly everyone in the world not currently taking antipsychotic medication.

President Trump is running rings around them, forcing the EU elites to make unforced errors. Trump is wielding their own elitism as a weapon against them. President Macron’s resentful insta-summit included the seven ’best’ EU countries —France, the UK, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Netherlands, and Denmark— but this “elites of the elite” invitational snobbery promptly created some entirely predictable friction.

Yesterday, Bloomberg’s headline betrayed the sense of subsidiary FOMO experienced by the rest of the European continent:

It’s a conundrum. If you leave out any of the Continent’s very self-important leaders, you risk offending some of the most easily offended personalities in the world. But if you invite everybody, all 27 of them, then the really important pro-war poltroons have much less time to bloviate and condemn the United States. Quelle horreur!

🚀 The truth is, Europe lacks any good options. None of the EU countries can hold a candle to the four peace-preferring superpowers, neither militarily nor economically. In its war mania, Europe has destroyed its own energy infrastructure, sunk most of its current military readiness into a losing war in Ukraine, crippled its economies with Russian sanctions, and tragically de-industrialized — making it infinitely harder to manufacture any new tanks, bombs, or guns.

Europe’s political establishment is as weak as it has been since World War II. It is desperately —and increasingly uselessly— trying to ward off a populist, pro-America (pro-Trump) revolution. We now see the rationale, pre-planning, and genius behind Elon’s support of Germany’s AfD party, for example. Divide and conquer.

But it is much worse than that for the EU’s war maniacs. For murky, incomprehensible grievances stretching back hundreds or thousands of years, the main EU countries have lodged in their DNA a pathological hatred for Russia. The worst-case scenario for them is the hideous, unimaginable prospect that America would normalize relations with Russia— and that scrawled threat is exactly what appears to be written on the summit’s white-board wall.

See, e.g., Old Testament. Belshazzar’s feast, et al.

🚀 CNN reported that Foreign Minister Lavrov said the upcoming Trump-Putin discussion “will aim to end the ‘abnormal period’ in relations between the two great powers.” In other words: normalization. This means the end of sanctions, the end of the Proxy War, the end of World War III brinksmanship, and the end of large US forces in Europe, but adding in new trade agreements, security talks, and de-dollarization de-escalation.

Trump has even openly speculated about reducing mutual military investments—a more ambitious peace plan than Reagan’s historic deal to reduce nuclear stockpiles.

No bureaucracy, but especially not the European multi-state bureaucracy, can compete with the velocity that Trump is demonstrating. They literally cannot keep up. While Europe was still reacting to the first phone call between Trump and Putin, Trump’s team had already scheduled the Saudi Arabia summit, and will meet today.

I’m not sure any major peace summit has ever come together this fast.

Trump is sealing deals while Europe is still sealing envelopes. Trump is playing a high-speed, high-stakes geopolitical chess game, while Europe has just started organizing working groups to debate where to put the pieces on the board. Le roi est en échec. They just don’t know it yet.

Get ready. Everything we’ve seen so far has been battlespace preparation. We are about to watch the plans unfold.

Have a terrific Tuesday! We’ll pull the threads together again tomorrow morning, same time, same place.

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