https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/10-days-that-shook-the-world-580339510 Days That Shook the World
By Jeffrey A. Tucker
2/5/2025
NOTE: When reading at The Epoch Times, either use your browser's "reader mode", or disable javascript using a free plugin or add-on.Excerpts:In 1917, American journalist Jack Reed, a naive but talented communist ideologue with a blue-blood education, was in Russia to watch and cheer on a revolution. He was there in October when the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky held power—Czar Nicholas II had been overthrown—but refused to pull the nation out of the murderous Great War or otherwise reform.
The government was thus overthrown again, this time by the Bolsheviks who ruled for 70 years thereafter. Reed chronicled the moment in his famous book “Ten Days that Shook the World.” It set forth the narrative of these days for a century. It was a major reason why that generation of literate Americans, lacking access to other information sources, considered Vladimir Lenin to be a hero. Reed, by the way, later died and was buried in the Kremlin.
That book and the events it valorized has now been superseded by another 10 days that have shaken the world. Donald Trump took the oath of office to become U.S. President on Jan. 20, 2025, following a sweeping and decisive victory that the entire establishment fought ferociously.
I’m typing this 10 days later. It is clear to me and many others that nothing will ever be the same, not in the United States and not anywhere in the world that is watching the exciting events unfold. It’s nothing like we’ve ever seen, and far beyond anything we had expected or even been promised.
Whereas Reed’s Ten Days were about the building of the Leviathan state, our own 10 days is about tearing it down and restoring freedom. Already what has been uncovered and stopped is for the ages, to the point that as I write the United States has plugged scandalous spending leakage at a rate of $4 billion per day, thanks to the work of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.
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The excitement began minutes after inauguration when the team of Elon Musk, tasked by Trump to figure out what is going on with this empire of lies, unfurled a plan that had long been in the works but never announced. They installed sofa beds on the 5th floor of the Office of Personnel Management and tossed out the chief of staff. The plan was to work 24/7 to get the job done, never leaving the offices. Yes, in Godfather parlance, they literally “went to the mattresses.”
They gained access to the computer system and sent a memo to 2.3 million federal government employees. It invited all of them to resign immediately and get 8 months of severance. They only needed to hit reply and type “resign.” The expectation going into this was that 10 percent would flee but it could be more. We are still waiting for the numbers.
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Following the takeover of the Office of Personnel Management, the truly great challenge was to get to the source of the largess, the spigot spilling so much money that it was creating $1 trillion in debt every 100 days. This has gotten worse decade after decade. It is the determination of DOGE to get to the bottom of it.
The team—which converted itself quickly into an official government office to evade that obvious criticism—headed to the U.S. Treasury and announced an audit of the entire government. In order to conduct that, they would need the logins to the system. The auditors had already figured out that the whole government was operating on autopay, with billions flowing to enemy regimes and rackets of all sorts. Shutting that down had to be priority number one.
What they found was an acting head of the U.S. Treasury named David A. Lebryk, who turns out to be the highest-ranking person in the civil service. Lebryk had been promoted to that position on January 20, but his former boss was the deputy head of Treasury, a Nigerian émigré named Wally Adeyemo, who had at one time been head of the Obama Foundation. His resignation put Lebryk in the driver’s seat of the world’s biggest outgoing payroll system.
That’s right, you cannot make this stuff up!
Lebryk absolutely refused to turn over the passwords. After what was said to be a shouting match, he resigned on the spot. Then Elon’s crew took control of the passwords to the system that was sending out $6 trillion on autopay.
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There will be more court challenges, claims, and counterclaims, but mainly we can look forward to an information flood of finding out precisely how our tax dollars have been used these many years if not for decades. This is in many ways the ultimate nightmare of any entrenched bureaucracy that has been unburdened by accountability for a very long time.
Change is now here, and it appears that the Trump administration is not letting up. All the while, Trump’s cabinet picks were facing a brutal grilling from Senators. This time, however, we have the means to discover the hand in the glove. We have tools like Open the Books, Open Secrets, and others, to reveal precisely what industrial interests are behind these politicians. It appears as of this writing that public pressure is going to push all of Trump’s picks through.
No one can say for sure how this story ends but we are getting an intuition. The Trump administration, barring some unforeseen disaster, is well positioned to go down in history as the regime that saved the country from secret and systematic pillaging that has been going on without check for probably all living memory.
Is that an exaggeration? Sadly, it does not appear to be so based on what we are learning by the hour. These are the new Ten Days that Shook the World. The first time around, history was set on a path toward the disaster of communism and totalitarianism. This time, the revolution is being reversed—the people are really taking charge from an elite class that has enjoyed unchecked rule in the Western world for all of living memory.
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