There were actually two great picks that came out late last week. The FBI Director Kash Patel and the new NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. Both of these men are sorely needed to investigate corruption and weaponization of government in the FBI and NIH. In this post, let’s take a look at Kash Patel, and remember the corruption of his successor, Christopher Wray.

Here’s an article from New York Post:

President-elect Donald Trump has selected Kash Patel to lead the FBI, closing one of the last remaining presidentially appointed positions available two months before taking office — and putting current bureau boss Christopher Wray’s tenure on the chopping block before his term expires.

[…]The New York native is known for his deep loyalty to Trump — which has made him a target of the left despite serving as a National Security Council official, senior adviser to the acting Director of National Intelligence, and later, chief of staff to the acting United States secretary of defense.

Patel, who will have to earn Senate confirmation to become FBI director, was one of the leading Republicans who opposed the investigation into Trump and Russian interference in 2016, long opposing government overreach in how its federal agents surveil Republicans.

He has written about the need to dismantle the Justice Department and do an overhaul of the intelligence agencies, including the FBI, by firing their “top ranks” and prosecuting “to the fullest extent of the law” anyone who “in any way abused their authority for political ends.”

“[T]he FBI has become so thoroughly compromised that it will remain a threat to the people unless drastic measures are taken,” Patel wrote in his book, “Government Gangsters,” which Trump lauded as a “blueprint” for his next term.

Former corrupt FBI Director Andrew McCabe doesn’t like the pick:

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe cautioned against Patel, claiming on CNN Thursday that “no part of the FBI’s mission is safe with Kash Patel in any position of leadership in the FBI.”

[…]McCabe butted heads with the 45th president over the FBI’s Trump-Russia collusion probe, pursued the debunked Steele dossier and was fired as acting director of the bureau for leaking sensitive case information to a journalist.

Patel will have a lot of work to do, as the FBI has basically become the equivalent of the East German Stasi under Biden-Harris. Using taxpayer money to suppress dissent from leftism and elect Democrat politicians.

My favorite source for conservative policy is Daily Signal, and here is what they said about his qualifications:

During the first Trump administration, Patel was the chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.

Before that, Patel was the deputy assistant to the president and the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.

While at the NSC, he helped oversee Trump policies that included eliminating the Islamic State terrorist group, as well as Al Qaeda leadership such as al-Baghdadi and Qasem al-Rimi.

Patel also was the principal deputy to the former Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell, who oversaw the operations of 17 intelligence community agencies.

Before going to the White House, Patel was senior counsel for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, under then-Chairiman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and oversaw the investigation into the Russian active measures campaign to influence the 2016 presidential–election.

He also played a key role in the Nunes memo that showed the FBI relied on partisan “politically motivated or questionable sources” to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

The two and a half year investigation into whether Trump conspired with the Russian government to win the 2016 election was prompted by information fed to the FBI from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and Democrat operatives. The House panel and later special counsel Robert Mueller concluded there was no evidence that Trump conspired with Russians.

Now, let’s have a quick review of why Trump needs Kash Patel to replace the current FBI Director, Christopher Wray.

Here’s the story from the Daily Signal:

FBI Director Christopher Wray may have lied under oath concerning the FBI Richmond office’s Jan. 23 memo citing the Southern Poverty Law Center in urging investigation of “radical traditional Catholic hate groups,” Rep. Jim Jordan suggested in a letter sent Wednesday.

The issue is that Wray tried to minimize the scope of the FBI’s investigation into Catholics:

On July 12, Wray testified to the House Judiciary Committee that the memo represented “a single product by a single field office, which, as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems.”

He says it was a “single field office”, but the memo reveals collaboration between multiple field offices.

I think all Christians and conservatives would be thrilled if they were allowed to be pro-life without having their doors battered down in the early morning by SWAT teams.

Remember this story from Daily Wire?

FBI agents reportedly raided the home of a pro-life activist in Pennsylvania on Friday and arrested him.

A group of between 25 and 30 FBI agents raided the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, home of pro-life activist Mark Houck early Friday morning, his family told LifeSite News. Houck is the leader of a nonprofit group that provides sidewalk counseling at abortion clinics in Philadelphia.

[…]“The kids were all just screaming,” Houck’s wife, Ryan-Marie, told LifeSite. “It was all just very scary and traumatic.”

Ryan-Marie Houck told the outlet that the group of agents in SWAT gear arrived in 15 vehicles outside the family home at around 7:05 a.m. Friday morning. The agents quickly surrounded the house and began pounding on the door, demanding they open up. Houck reportedly tried to get the agents to calm down, noting that his seven children were scared, but the agents kept shouting. “[T]hey had big, huge rifles pointed at Mark and pointed at me and kind of pointed throughout the house,” his wife said.

What did he do to get his house raided by 25-30 armed FBI agents in 15 vehicles?

This:

According to his wife, Houck was providing sidewalk counseling at abortion centers in Philadelphia last year, and had taken his then 12-year-old son. On multiple occasions over weeks, a “pro-abortion protestor” allegedly shouted vulgarities and insults at the boy. Houck repeatedly told the protestor not to speak to his son, but the protestor continued to encroach on the boy’s personal space, still spewing vulgarities. Finally, Houck shoved the man away, causing him to fall down. The protestor was not injured, but tried to sue Houck. Though the case was thrown out this summer, it was somehow picked up by the DOJ, Ryan-Marie Houck said.

Many powerful secular leftists in this country are all terrified of Christiand and conservatives using government to coerce them. They are terrified, but they are the only ones who ever abuse power to punish their political enemies. We need to stop secular leftists from using government as a weapon against people they disagree with, to benefit the political party they favor.

Recently, I debated on Twitter with Dr. Michael Austin, president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. He supported Kamala Harris, because he thought that both parties are the same on abortion. I explained that Kamala supported legislation to end state-level pro-life laws, and Trump didn’t. He claimed that the total number of abortions had gone up after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

If you get a challenge like this one, I would start by explaining that it’s possible for the overall number of abortions to go up, even as the numbers declined in pro-life states because of restrictions on abortions passed in those pro-life states. In that case, the increase in abortions in states with no restrictions on abortion would be larger than decrease in abortions in states with pro-life legislation. Then I would explain how Kamala had previously supported legislation to end those state-level restrictions. That makes her position on abortion different from Trump, who would leave those restrictions in place.

Today’s post counters the original claim that Michael Austin made that the total number of abortions went UP after Roe v. Wade was repealed.

This is from Daily Wire:

Abortions of unborn babies fell 2% the year the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC’s annual abortion surveillance report, published on Wednesday, found that a total of 613,383 unborn babies were legally aborted within 48 reporting areas in the United States in 2022, the year the High Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe.

Out of the 47 areas that were consistently reporting data between 2021 and 2022, there was a 2% decrease from the 622,108 unborn babies who were legally aborted in 2021, to 609,360 in 2022.

By the way, I’ve noticed that a lot of Christian philosophers want to reduce policy debates down to abortion. They don’t seem to have thought through how other policy areas affect a Christian’s ability to live out a Christian life. For example, my ability to work and earn in the competitive private sector as a software engineer is affected by many, many different areas of policy. That’s why I have to know a little about many different areas, like energy policy, education policy, guns and crime, basic economics, health care policy, etc. I am affected by the prices of gas and electricity. I am affected by the price of health care. I am affected by government regulations. I am affected by bans on firearms and bans on self-defense. I am affected by rising costs due to illegal immigration. If I lived in an ivory tower, and was mainly concerned with impressing my colleagues with words, then maybe these topics wouldn’t matter to me. I get the impression that philosophers are not informed in these areas, because they have chosen a discipline that often insulates them from the need to solutions that work in the real world.

If I wanted to understand something about economics, I would read Thomas Sowell. If I wanted to understand something about guns and crime, I would read John Lott. If I wanted to understand something about health care, I would read Regina Hertzlinger or Avik Roy. And so on. In the real world, you can’t arrive at correct beliefs with “thought experiments”. You need to run real experiments – in the lab. You need to write real code – in the lab. It’s so important for people to have private sector work experience, developing solutions for customer problems in the competitive private sector.

Philosophers are the people LEAST LIKELY to understand basic economics. They tend to support bigger government in order to get more bailouts and redistribution of wealth.

Here’s an article from Newsweek:

Overall, socialism isn’t winning over the majority of college students. When broken down by major, though, its popularity doubled with philosophy students.

[…]Only 39 percent of the 10,590 undergraduates polled had a favorable view of socialism, and the same percentage responded that they had an unfavorable view. When respondents were broken out by major views of capitalism shifted considerably.

Philosophy majors were most likely to view socialism positively, with 78 percent of those polled saying they had at least a somewhat favorable view of it. Anthropology majors were a close second at 64 percent, followed by English majors at 58 percent and international relations, sociology and music majors all at 57 percent.

Least likely to view socialism favorably were accounting and finance majors at 20 percent and 22 percent respectively.

Why are most philosophers so wrong on areas that touch on reality, like finance and economics? Maybe, it’s because they make their living with words. Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, who is one of the good philosophers, calls people like this “wordsmiths”.

He explains the consequences of being a “wordsmith” here in this essay for the Cato Policy Report (Cato Institute):

What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools. As book knowledge became increasingly important, schooling–the education together in classes of young people in reading and book knowledge–spread. Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher’s favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better.

The schools, too, exhibited and thereby taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit. To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher’s smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.

The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority “entitled” them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

Now, it’s important to be fair and acknowledge that some “wordsmiths” do understand finance and economics. But it’s the minority. It’s a sad thing when one of these wordsmiths manages to get to the top of an evangelical organization, though. Which is why you need to be careful what you let your children study, and where you send your donations. Giving money to evangelical wordsmiths who think that “Jesus didn’t care about politics” and “both parties are the same on abortion” and “abortions went up after the repeal of legalized abortion” is a waste of money.