Are We The Baddies?

Reflections on the Financial Revelations of the Week Plus My New Motto for 2025

File: NNC-US-1877-G$50-Half Union gold pattern (J-1546).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Every year I like to pick a motto for the year. Some people like to choose a Bible verse like Micah 6:8 or a word, like “Hope.” My family has picked mottos for the new year since I was very small, and I have tried to keep up the tradition. When I was a teenager (or tween?), one year our motto was “This Too Shall Pass” which was a great comfort in the long, lonely days of village life of no visitors and little communication with the outside world. The year my grandmother died I had picked, “Where are we going and why are we in the handbasket” which turned out to be true, to my enormous grief. Another memorable year was, “Let me be your morning cup of coffee.” I think that was the January I began to blog in earnest. Every year I wait a bit to find out what the motto will be. Will it be something like, “I know the plans I have for you?” “Go and do thou likewise?” “I can do all things?” Or perhaps a fake CS Lewis or Marcus Aurelius quote? This year wasn’t too hard. Ready? The Official Demotivation’s Motto for 2025 is……

How Dare We

This motto came to me organically, for it is already in the common parlance of prominent figures in public life. Madam Harris, for example, used it about celebrating Christmas. And who could ever forget its iconic use by Greta Thunberg in her innocent days when her dreams were being stolen?

I bring this particular motto up today, because, well, perhaps you have noticed that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is recommending the pipeline of money flowing out of agencies like the USAID be shut off. That acronym stands for United States Agency for International Development. Many of us mistakenly thought “AID” stood for “aid.” That was an epic level of naïveté.

Politico, it turns out, received such a sufficient amount of cash from the USAID, that nobody got paid yesterday. Can you imagine? The ordinary people who read Politico were not sufficient in number to keep the operation afloat. When DOGE turned off the tap, no one received a check. It must have been an entire building of Miltons clinging onto red staplers, vowing to get revenge. It was an extraordinary discovery, but not even the worst one.

For it turns out that the New York Times, America’s Paper of Record, received millions dollars from the government. And all the while I’ve been sending in my measly five dollars in order to catalogue the vile degeneracy of the Modern Love Section. How long ago was it that the NYTimes published that piece authored by a woman who was still “in love” with her husband but was leaving him anyway to find herself? The Modern Love section is a cesspool of relational idiocy. It is the daily deluge of emotionally stunted hook ups and self-justification. In any other age, it would have been so roundly mocked from its inception as to go and bury its head in the social media algorithm, never to become viral again. And yet, the whole paper received millions of dollars that, one imagines, kept it afloat, even as fewer and fewer numbers of people read it.

And the AP, and the BBC, and, well, wouldn’t you know it, Christianity Today to the tune of 1.2 million dollars. And the After Party. And Preston Sprinkle. And Revoice, an organization that received 40.000 dollars.