The Sizzle: What the News Won't Tell You (Feb. 4, 2025)

Topic: The Sizzle

Welcome to the latest installment of The Sizzle, which provides a deeper assessment of what the news won’t tell you when rattling off typically deranged headlines and untruthful narratives. These musings cover items and stories prevalent here at the beginning of February 2025.

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I. The Truest Conservative of Them All

Longtime readers of Captain K’s Corner know I am very cynical of ideological purity and no longer care to be described as a conservative. It’s not that I’m not one of the most right-wing minded people you’ll ever meet, it’s that I think intellectual conservatism has run its course and perhaps never truly existed outside of seminars and cruise ships in real practice.

I am better described as an accelerationist or pragmatist, as I lamented in the linked article above back in August 2023:

“…this is called the Republican Party. It’s not called the Conservative Party.”

Donald Trump uttered those lines in 2016 when fending off critics from within the GOP who expressed their displeasure at the party’s presumptive nominee shortly after he had smoked out John Kasich and Ted Cruz in Indiana’s primary, and though they are less memorable than many of his zingers during that campaign, I have never forgotten them.

I recommend watching Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s video outlining the incredible achievements of Trump 47, just two weeks into his term. What I’m about to spin here is something you’re not even going to find in so-called conservative media, even sources that mean well and don’t waste their time, energy, and money tearing down a nationalist agenda.

Do you remember when Trump was lambasted by the former management of RedState.com relentlessly in the run-up to his 2016 victory? About how he wasn’t a true conservative (sips champagne), would appoint his family to the Supreme Court, wanted to mandate abortion for women at 39 weeks, and so on? Well, it turns out Trump is the truest conservative of them all, given all the constant lecturing from the conservative intelligentsia about how we must pursue limited government.

Now, I have no doubt Trump 47 will pursue and achieve many things that require more government involvement, contracts, money, and manpower, like a border wall, by definition not technically conservative, but needed and warranted in practice (another reason I don’t put myself into ideological buckets ahead of pragmatic ones). But you tell me – is there anything more limiting of government than eliminating and destroying entire departments and agencies of the federal government?

Perhaps you should email some employees at the USAID or the Department of Education and ask them. Oh, wait – they were given a cardboard box already and are no longer on the company server. The plot thickens…