☕️ WATERLOO ☙ Monday, February 17, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Deep State's Waterloo moment as DOGE dishes biggest scandal in human history; media's Napoleonic meltdown over Trump tweet; NYT op-ed signals massive win; funemployment in the Swamp; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! The weekend’s news did not disappoint. Prepare for more exposed history in the making. In today’s roundup: in a month of history-making news, the story that rules them all, a genie of disclosure that can’t be stuffed back in the Social Security bottle; Trump’s ninja-level troll and the media’s Napoleonic meltdown over movie quote; Democrat dreams of rescue from dictatorship by the courts ebbs away in brutal NYT birthright op-ed; and funemployment strikes the Swamp amidst enthusiastic draining.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

I confess to feeling lately like I’m starting to overuse words like “historic,” “unprecedented,” “revolutionary,” and “never seen before.” I need more words. But what can I do? We live in a time when centuries of history are being minted in minutes. Regardless, and unapologetically, this next story will blow your socks off.

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We’ve discovered the Great Democrat Zombie Army.

A full decade ago in 2015, the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General reported that 6.5 million active Social Security numbers were assigned to people aged 112 or older, despite there being only 35 such individuals known to be living worldwide. (Robert Kennedy should be happy to hear about this.) That was alarming enough, but in 2023, an expanded audit looked at SSNs aged 100 and up. This time, 18.9 million active SSNs with birthdates of 1920 or earlier lacked a date of death, meaning they are still active.

But last year (2024), PEW Research reported there are only 80,000 living Americans aged 100+, leaving a shocking discrepancy of 18.8 million mysterious perennial people still receiving social security and possibly disability as well, not to mention generous credits from phantom tax returns, and of course, blue state and local benefits.

And of course, these immortal individuals are probably also voting. Voting Democrat.

The IG’s 2023 follow-up report detailed all the Agency’s terrific progress in resolving the problems identified since the earlier 2015 report. In short, the Social Security Administration’s diligent, alert, and apolitical permanent career civil servants grabbed hold of the IG’s 2015 report with both hands and shoved it into the basement furnace.

I, for one, thank the gods of bureaucrats for all the hardworking, non-biased, non-partisan federal workers in the Social Security Administration who concluded, probably right after their 3-mimosa-lunch (held by Zoom), that it was just too hard and too expensive to stop 18.9 million fraudulent social security records by putting a presumed date of death into the date field. It’s no use.

It’s not like it might have made any difference in the 2020 election or anything.

🔥 I’m sure this will (not) shock you. Both times, 2015 and 2023, the media ignored or downplayed the story. A sane person living in pre-Millennial America might assume that the tireless watchdog media, upon learning about the vast numbers of impossibly fake Social Security accounts and the trillions of dollars of attendant waste and fraud would never give the government a moment’s peace until it was fixed.

But no.

We are not surprised. We are scarred veterans of the post-Millennial period, and we understand the media’s main job is not to expose, but to cover up government incompetence — and especially bury any news at all that might fuel legitimate concerns about election integrity.

Not to mention upholding corporate media’s timeless narrative chestnut that entitlement fraud is rare and overhyped and only a right-wing conspiracy theory. That narrative, after all, is as timeless as the millions of zombified centenarian recipients.

In 2015, apart from one-offs in some conservative media (Breitbart, Washington Times, Fox), I could only find a single AP story about the 6.5 million fraudulent Social Security records aged 112+. In 2023, after the SSA’s OIG published its report finding 19 million digitally breathing people over 100 still “alive” in the system, once again, there was mostly media silence. It should have been a five-alarm fire, but only a handful of “far-right” sites mentioned the news (Federalist, Washington Examiner). The usually reliable New York Post only briefly mentioned the OIG report, but even that was buried in a bigger article about government waste generally.

But CNN, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the other major outlets? Crickets. My searches came up empty. It just wasn’t important enough to report.

In the latest electrifying development that will also probably not shock you, DOGE —for the last week slogging through the SSA’s septic systems of archaic paper and antique Cobol software — is beginning to report that the OIG canaries in the SSA mineshaft were, if anything, woefully underreporting the problem.

🔥 Yesterday, apparent DOGE mouthpiece Elon Musk posted a simple database count of active Social Security Numbers by age range. The dumbfounding chart was a political hydrogen bomb, and it speaks for itself:

Apparently, we’ve been operating on the honor system this whole time. We normal, non-civil-service Americans were the only ones who didn’t know. It’s just the latest reason they sneer at us and think we’re stupid and gullible. Those neanderthal conservatives will believe anything. They’re right. We’re the biggest suckers in human history.

I added up the numbers for our cherished, specially abled readers in Portland. Based on Elon’s chart, the total count of active SSNs is 398 million. That means there are +64 million more active SSNs than the entire population of the United States (334 million).

Let me say it again: sixty-four million zombies. Needless to say, it’s totally impossible, at least under our current scientific understanding of human mortality. The diligent, hardworking, apolitical employees in the federal government appear to have diligently preserved a shadow army of dead or nonexistent “Americans” on the books — zombies — with tens of millions of them potentially still receiving benefits, filing tax returns, and “voting” Democrat.

This appears to be a scandal of unfathomable, indescribable, revolutionary proportions. Since I have a very strong feeling that we will not be receiving tax refunds for our cataclysmically misspent entitlements lavished on millions of career criminals, including those inside the government, I say burn it all down.

There is no fixing this. There is no audit big enough. There is no reform package meaningful enough. It is a soul-crushing abomination. It boils the blood. It is enraging beyond explanation. Just napalm the whole Kafkaesque apparatus and start over from scratch.

This scandal will be the Deep State's Waterloo.

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Speaking of French dictators, consider yesterday’s UK Guardian’s breathlessly misleading article headlined, “Trump suggests he’s above the law with ominous Napoleon quote.” What gave media the vapors this time was a classic Trump troll in the form of an uncharacteristically short and muted single-sentence post. To be fair, he posted it everywhere, on Truth Social, on X, and it was re-tweeted on the official White House Twitter account. It simply said:

In no way, of course, did Trump’s post suggest doing anything illegal or unconstitutional. Media had to project and to impute motives to discover Trump’s sinister hidden meaning. Which they did, of course, in spades and with great enthusiasm. See! We told you! He’s a dictator!

But Trump just appeared to be obliquely quoting the 1970 film Waterloo, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, in which the dictatorial frenchman Napoleon said he “did not ‘usurp’ the crown.”

The quip arose during a compelling scene where Napoleon Bonaparte, played by Rod Steiger, addressed his marshals during a critical moment. Pressured to abdicate after a series of military setbacks, Napoleon confronted his marshals, who’d presented him with a paper urging his abdication. In a display of defiance and justification, he soaringly said: “I found the crown in the gutter, and I picked it up with my sword, and it was the people … who put it on my head,” he says. “He who saves a nation violates no law.”

CLIP: Waterloo (1970) - Napoleon trailer (3:38).

The media’s absurd reaction was swift and totally deranged. The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie hysterically called Trump’s latest statement “the single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.” Neocon Never-Trumper Bill Kristol, a living caricature of Godwin’s Law, raced to grab the Hitler comparison, darkly warning that “We're getting into real Führerprinzip territory here.”

Once again, the media owned itself, falling headfirst into Trump’s trap. Meanwhile, the indefensible DOGE disclosures keep escalating—like yesterday’s thermonuclear Social Security nuclear apocalypse. To mix film metaphors, they’re going to need a bigger Deep State.

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Another reason the overwrought ‘dictator’ charges keep falling flat is because Trump keeps following the law. On Saturday, no less than the New York Times ran a narrative-smashing op-ed headlined, “Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship.” The Democrats’ first ‘win’ against Trump is already crumbling—and even the Gray Lady is sounding the retreat. Like Napoleon at Waterloo, they confidently stormed into battle, realizing too late they marched straight into a legal ambush.

On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order ending so-called birthright citizenship for certain children of illegal immigrants. Democrats sued, wailing that his EO violated the 14th Amendment, which provides, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

The key issue, intentionally provoked by the executive order, is what exactly does the Constitution mean by “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States? Federal judges in four states promptly enjoined Trump’s order. One of the judges claimed it “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment.”

But, the article advised, “Not necessarily.”

The Supreme Court has never held that children born to illegal immigrants are citizens — never. But thanks to decades of judicial hand-waving and bureaucratic indifference, citizenship has been quietly doled out with all the discretion of Social Security numbers.

The 14th Amendment’s well-known purpose was to convey citizenship to children of freed slaves. At the time it passed, Lincoln’s administration had rejected the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, and had already recognized free African Americans as citizens. The 14th Amendment resolved the Constitutional crisis in Lincoln’s favor.

The carefully considered article delved into the history of citizenship through the centuries. Then it noted the Supreme Court’s awareness of that storied common law history, which has long provided that only those born “in amity” receive the sovereign blessings of citizenship status:

This isn’t just some obscure legal technicality—the principle was common knowledge at the time the 14th passed. Citizenship was for people who owed allegiance to the U.S., not just anyone who happened to be born here. As our forefathers never fought for millions of imaginary Social Security recipients, the 14th Amendment wasn’t written to pass out citizenship to millions of undocumented invaders lacking loyalty to the country.

This editorial’s publication was a massive shift in the Overton Window, preparing the Times’ readers for bad news. The left’s sacred cow of birthright citizenship is finally getting serious legal scrutiny, and the fact that the New York Times is already conceding ground means they know their side’s legal foundation is much shakier than they’ve previously pretended.

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The Swamp is going to need a bigger unemployment database. CNBC ran a story yesterday headlined, “Unemployment spikes in Washington, D.C., as Trump and Musk begin efforts to shrink the government.” The sub-headline added, “Jobless filings in Washington, D.C., surged to 1,780 for the week ending Feb. 8, a +36% increase from the prior week.” Pro tip: get out of Washington.

During the disastrous Obama-era economy, as jobs for people outside government crashed and burned, Nancy Pelosi infamously coined the term “funemployment.” The fossilized Speaker urged people collecting generous government unemployment benefits to spend time traveling, writing poetry, painting landscapes, and starting up NGO’s to teach transgender basket-weaving techniques to Namibian kindergartners.

It’s fun!

During the first two years of the pandemic, as ordinary Americans lost our jobs and small businesses by the millions, we were constantly assured by our federal betters that we were sacrificing for the common good. Meanwhile, the federal workforce metastasized, swelling like a taxpayer-funded tumor. Government workers got paid to ‘work from home’—which meant collecting full salaries, grant payments, and dead grandmothers’ Social Security checks between Netflix binges.

Maybe now it’s federal workers’ turn to sacrifice something for the common good.

Prepare for corporate media to circulate their perennial “hardest hit” sob stories, interviewing scores of bizarrely named ex-federal workers on food stamps who used to work on critically important projects like measuring the immeasurable land speed of treadmilled tortoises, mapping the astonishing diversity of prairie dog dialects, or making sure dead people kept getting their Social Security checks.

But remember: Trump gave them a chance. He offered eight month’s severance to any federal worker that wanted to take the deal. They didn’t take the deal.

There’s an old saying about making your own bed. It goes something like, if you make your own bed, you have to clean out the cheeto crumbs by yourself. Or words to that effect. They made their own beds. Don’t fall for media guilt manipulation.

Trump promised to drain the Swamp, and he meant it, this time. I’d only ask that he turn the draining machine up to 11.

Have a magnificent Monday! Swirl back around tomorrow morning for another delicious installment of Coffee & Covid’s essential news and commentary.

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