Tag: elites

Out of Control Feds

The Portly Politico1 Comment

A benefit of writing this little blog is that I read (and, usually, skim) a great deal of material from all over the web, and come away knowing more than I otherwise would.  My hope is to take some of the flotsam and jetsam I come across and condense and give context to it.

Such was the situation with Jim Treacher, the pseudonym of Sean Medlock.  Treacher/Medlock is a lukewarm Never Trumper (from what I can gather) who writes for PJ Media.  Treacher wrote a piece earlier in the week about “conservative” website The Bulwark, which is unhinged neocon Bill Kristol‘s new pet project since The Weekly Standard was unceremoniously shuttered a few months ago.

That piece, “In What Sense is The Bulwark Conserving Conservatism,” is not the point of this post, but it is a disturbing read.  Treacher examines the self-righteous scribblings of Molly Jong-Fast, who covered CPAC for The Bulwark.  CPAC is the major event in conservative activism, and every year generates plenty of controversy between the warring factions of Conservatism, Inc.  Jong-Fast (hyphenated names make my skin crawl) basically spent the entire conference shuddering about how “anti-choice” the conference was, and making jokes about a group of conservatives wanting to limit the size and scope of the federal government.

What did you expect, baby?  CPAC isn’t a meeting of the D.C. Workers’ Soviet.  Yeesh.  Read the piece to get the full flavor for this foolishness.  It proves the claims from Dissident Right figures that modern “conservatism” doesn’t conserve anything, and yesterday’s Leftist utopia is today’s “conservative principle.”

Tough words to type, but in the case of Kristol and his ilk, terribly true.  Regardless, in the piece Treacher mentions in passing being struck by a State Department vehicle in 2010, which prevented his attendance at CPAC.

That took me down a frightening rabbit hole:  a State Department vehicle struck Treacher, who was in the crosswalk at the time.  The State Department agent driving the vehicle, Mike McGuinn, did not apologize to Treacher; indeed, Treacher was issued a ticket for jaywalking—while in his hospital bed!

Some key excerpts from The Daily Caller‘s piece about the incident:

An agent in the vehicle, Mike McGuinn, did not identify himself to Medlock at the scene, or apologize for running him down. Indeed, Washington, D.C., police drove to a local emergency room to serve Medlock with a jaywalking citation as he lay prostrate in a hospital bed, while a man who identified himself as “special agent” stood by watching and taking notes….

At the hospital, DC police officer John Muniz arrived to issue Medlock a $20 jaywalking ticket. Medlock was lying sedated on a gurney, so Muniz delivered the ticket to a Daily Caller colleague, who was at the hospital with Medlock. He looked embarrassed as he did so. Behind him stood a man dressed in a dark suit who identified himself as a “special agent.” He said nothing but wrote in a notebook.

Curiously, the ticket says that Medlock was struck at an intersection four blocks from where the accident actually took place. And it claims that Medlock was walking diagonally across the intersection at the time. In one of his strikingly short conversations with the Daily Caller, agent Mike McGuinn acknowledged that Medlock was not jaywalking at all, but walking “outside the crosswalk when the incident occurred.”

The question is: Did the federal agent driving the SUV, faced with potential liabilities from the accident, encourage local police to issue some sort – any sort – of citation to Medlock, to establish his culpability?

Three years later, Treacher wrote a piece for The Daily Caller detailing the State Department’s practice of hiring law enforcement personnel with checkered pasts.

Here we have a federal bureaucracy utterly indifferent to the lives of the citizens it ostensibly serves.  In Treacher’s case, I can’t tell if it’s malignant indifference, or rank incompetence.  Bureaucracies of all stripes try to avoid liability and controversy—they exist to protect and expand themselves, after all—but only the federal government could get away with running someone down in a crosswalk, ticketing that person, and never owning up to its mistake.

I wrote yesterday about the presence of Deep State, anti-Trump actors in the State Department, and of their collusion with the Obama administration’s Department of Justice.  If they have the gall to attempt the takedown of a duly-elected President, then imagine their contempt and disregard for us.

Now that the Mueller probe has ended (I think that’s the takeaway from the promise that there would be no more indictments), Deep State perfidy will only grow more sinister.  Gird your loins, President Trump.

Friday Musings: Populism is East versus West

The Portly Politico4 Comments

I share my classroom with a veteran history teacher, who teaches my school’s eighth grade South Carolina History course.  The students are currently covering the events leading up to the American Revolution, particularly the unpopular Proclamation Line of 1763.  His discussion of the topic led me to a minor epiphany.

First, some historical context:  after the British defeated the French and their allies in the French and Indian War (the Seven Years’ War in Europe), millions of acres of land west of the Appalachian Mountains were open to American settlement.  The Americans were bursting with pride in delivering a hard-fought victory against Britain’s major European foe, and were eager to enjoy the spoils of war:  the newly opened lands.

Unfortunately, Parliament stalled land-hungry settlers with a well-intentioned but misguided policy:  the Proclamation Line of 1763.  According to an act of Parliament, there was to be no settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains.  The land was to be left to the Indians living there.

The policy was not without merit:  the British spent a great deal of blood and treasure fighting Indians during the French and Indian War, and while the conflict was global in nature, most of the fighting occurred in British North America and present-day Canada.  A major source of bad blood was the tendency of Americans to move onto Indian-owned lands; similarly, rapacious Indians would raid vulnerable settlers in the western parts of colonies (such raids fomented an early populist uprising of farmers in western Virginia, Bacon’s Rebellion, in 1676).  The British sought to avoid another costly war with the natives by preventing their future antagonism:  keep Americans off that land.

Americans, understandably, were livid.  For one, they saw it as Britain rewarding the very foes they’d just vanquished (keep in mind, too, the ferocity of native warriors—there’s a reason we name our military hardware and athletic teams “The Braves” and the like).  They also believed this land was their destiny and their birthright—having defeated a tenacious foe, they were ready to head west.

What got me thinking was a comment my colleague made; to paraphrase:  “If Parliament had just sat down with the colonists and discussed it with them, they could have avoided a lot of disaster.”  That comment made me realize:  so much populism is a conflict between an indifferent Eastern (now bicoastal) elite, and an energetic, cantankerous Western settler-class.

That is, by no means, a novel insight (see also:  Bacon’s Rebellion).  The insight, however, is the repeated unwillingness of elite interests to try to understand or cope with the sources of the common man’s difficulties.  Some differences are, indeed, intractable, but it seems that, in many cases, elites could hear out and account for the problems of the common folk.

Indeed, in many cases, both are right.  Consider the historic struggles between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.  Thank goodness George Washington heeded Hamilton’s advice for how to structure the finances of the young nation.  Hamilton’s fiscal policies set the United States on firm footing, building investor confidence and shoring up the American government’s credit.

On the other hand, Jefferson was right that Congress had no explicit authority to establish a national bank, and that we shouldn’t become too dependent on urban industrialization and finance, lest we lose our sense of republican virtue.

There are, increasingly, fundamental disconnects between America’s urban elites and rural commoners.  Witness New York State’s catastrophic, plainly satanic abortion law, which (from all the discussion around it), seems to allow for abortion while a woman is still in labor.  There’s no compromising with an idea that is, unarguably, evil.

That said, elites should take seriously the common American’s keen sense for fair play.  Illegal (and mass legal) immigration is deleterious not only because it is illegal, but because it hurts native-born Americans, driving down their wages (for the benefit of the elites) and transforming their neighborhoods and towns.  Americans will welcome a reasonable number of legal immigrants with open arms, but they expect immigrants to come legally, to assimilate, and to become loyal American citizens (including breaking ties with their old countries).

The elites are people, too, and often act in what they believe is for the greater good, or for long-term national preservation (at least, this statement seemed accurate in America’s past; our postmodern elites seem largely committed to undermining core American principles).  That said, they’ve adopted the Left’s prevailing ethos of de facto nihilism and materialist self-indulgence, along with the Left’s disdain for the common man.

In short, the elites have lost any sense of noblesse oblige, of obligation to maintaining a good, happy, healthy society.  They are as far removed from their fellow countrymen as East is from West.