Autopen-gate

 by Craig Willms

I agree with many others that autopen"gate" is easily the biggest presidential scandal ever. It makes Watergate seem like child's play. I doubt it will ever get the attention it rightly deserves. It just hit the news a few weeks ago, with this being late May 2025, just months after Joe Biden left the White House. The scandal hits at a time when people and the press are weary of scandals real and fabricated. Coming off the fiascos of Covid-19, an (allegedly) stolen presidential election, the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, the Russia/Ukraine war, the murderous Hamas attack on Israel and a clear and obvious dementia addled presidency - for starters. When you add the blistering and maligned candidacy of Donald Trump the fatigue is understandable. Nevertheless, no matter how tired and scandal weary we are we can't let the autopen conspiracy pass. 

For years, possibly all four years the federal government's executive branch was employing the autopen without the oversight of its current elected namesake. In other words presidential edicts, executive orders, pardons and commutations, funding decisions and myriad of other orders were signed into action by someone, anyone, who was not the President.

By the time we were allowed to talk about the decline and fall of Joe Biden, and the question of who exactly was in charge of executive actions was finally being asked, the autopen was in someone else's control. We don't know who or for how long, but that's beside the point, the President was not aware of those who would sign his name. That's a scandal of immense proportions. Don't however rely on the major media to cover it fairly, if at all. Why? "C'mon man" as Biden himself would say, "I'm a Democrat!"

Rest assured if Trump had not won the White House this scandal would have been swept under the rug and Biden would have been pardoned ala Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. I hope Trump and company doesn't let this go. There will be no consequences for Biden himself either way, but someone should be held to account and all autopen related orders scrutinized. Biden probably was and certainly is now disabled by dementia and we now learn faces advanced stage prostate cancer. He likely will not live long enough to see this play out.

I personally have no faith that the federal government will at any level uncover the length and width of this scandal, that's what being in the federal government means - never having to say you're sorry. As of today, May 28 2025 I predict this major scandal will fade away. We'll look back at this post and scratch our heads and say - what was all that autopen stuff about anyway???

Is DOGE a Gift to the Broligarchy?

 

by Craig Willms

With all the Elon and DOGE hate out there one has to wonder what left leaning people have against the concept of government efficiency? I kid... We all know all the hate is Trump hate redirected at DOGE and Elon Musk. On the face of it, the utter ridiculousness of directing all this ire at someone rooting out waste, fraud and abuse is laughable. Who could possibly be 'for' waste, fraud and abuse? Well, when you realize that much, if not most of the funding for the programs DOGE is rooting out supports only leftist causes or leftist politicians then it becomes clear why they hate, hate, hate so much. The left's gravy train is under threat.

Today I read a Naomi Wolfe piece on substack and she introduced me to a new term I had not heard before: The Broligarchy. What? Yes, the tech bros of Silicon Valley constitute this broligarchy. These California billionaires that run the high tech world we live in are an oligarchy of sorts. I don't  necessarily disagree. These guys (they are mostly guys) control the social media and other data collection and Big Data companies that collect and disseminate terabytes of our personal data for their own purposes. There is so much more to it than I can describe here, but be assured that in the end if you spend any amount of time on an Internet connected computer these guys know more about you than your husband or wife does. I'm not kidding now...

The evidence is all around you, but most apparent in the advertisements that are directed at you. How many times do you see ads related to something you just clicked on, searched for or even something that was spoken out loud? Yeah, I thought so. It's very creepy.

The speculation is that they, these broligarchs have run as far as they can go with the data they can easily collect. What they now desire is access to the pure unadulterated data that the government holds. Enter Elon Musk, the king of the tech bros. The next logical thought is a question...

Is Elon a plant? Is his role to open pathways to this data for his tech bro partners to access with their AI 'bots' so they can further control the monkeys? The monkeys are us BTW. Pretty fascinating isn't it? I don't necessarily believe it. In fact would find it hard to believe, but then I once thought that the Covid-19 over-reaction could not possibly be a ruse to make Big Pharma and Big Medicine billions of dollars. I was wrong on that. 

This speculation makes some sense, the government knows a lot about us. The government knows a lot about a lot of things these tech bros would love to get their hands on. But this doesn't pass the smell test. It has long been known that government computers and systems are out of date and possess weak security in many cases. Also, the techs, vendors and IT pros that float between the government and big tech know the loopholes in the systems. How hard is it really to access government data? Do they really need an inside guy at that level? Maybe. I can't say with any certainty despite the fact that I worked in network security as an engineer during my career. What I can say that I met people inside and outside the government and we hear things. Many companies in the security arena were staffed with ex-government types. They took what they learned from their time in government to develop new software tools to address the problems they saw, so they could sell it back to the government. They were often found selling it to us in the private sector because the wheels turned so slowly in government, elsewise they'd go broke.

Of course it's not a definitive answer to the Broligarchy question. Do they already possess the means to get at government data? Time will tell. AI may render all this moot anyway. We are headed into Matrix and Terminator territory or so it would seem.