Trump and J6 hatred partially explained
Ponder two different ways of making a living..
- Make a sale. Build a skyscraper. Open a restaurant. Convince a few hundred people out there to part with their money voluntarily for some product or service you offer. This is difficult work. You have to provide enough quality to give the product value, and you may not even be able to collect your money up front. The customer may need to be convinced his life will get better with your product, and most folks are not an easy sale. If the economy turns sour, if someone like Anthony Fauci declares a lockdown, if a natural disaster takes place, all of your customers may disappear entirely for a while.
- Take a government paycheck. You don’t need to convince, or find, any “customers.” Your “customers” are more or less ordered to use your services. You can be as rude or as nice to them as choose. If a calamity comes along you still get your paycheck. If you do your job poorly, you still get your paycheck. You don’t have to worry about ever getting fired or collecting your wages. If the customers don’t pay, a law enforcement officer will eventually order them out of their homes at gunpoint and auction their worldly goods for sale. You have a very efficient collection department.
I should say, at the outset, I know many fine civil servants who work very hard and who genuinely understand the “servant” nature of their profession. These folks are genuinely grateful for the chance to serve the public at the public’s expense. I should also say that these distinctions aren’t black and white. I know entrepreneurs who are progressive fans of the welfare state and police officers who abhor government waste. Likewise, there are quite a few Republicans–Dick Cheney types–who have figured out how to get their private-sector snout firmly plugged into the government trough.
But if you consider the great mass of people who reside in the five suburban counties closest to Washington DC, (a part of the country that seems weirdly insulated from economic downturns), you have to admit that some of these gigs are pretty sweet. You start with two weeks vacation and 12 federal holidays–that’s nearly a month of free pay the very first day you walk on the job. Put in a few years and you get six weeks vacation. Your pension and healthcare are paid by the taxpayers — and the pension part is really sweet. The stories about 50 year old civil servants retiring at 90% of their last pay check and collecting that paycheck through, say, 35 years of retirement, well, those are not just true; they are the norm. Ponder the unfunded pension liability problem, across the nation. On every level of government our tax dollars are going, more and more, to retired civil servants out on the golf course. That’s one of the reasons the potholes on your streets and freeways are not getting filled. We’re paying people who don’t do any work, and there’s less and less left over for basic maintenance.
How could a guy like Joe Biden not absolutely love government solutions or government policy? For nearly his entire life, he’s been a well fed creature of the state. And with a little influence-peddling, you can make a very good living on the side too. Where else could a guy get his cocaine-addicted son, with no petroleum expertise, a lucrative position in that industry on the other side of the world, with no real duties and ridiculously high pay?
Is it any wonder Joe Biden, and his kind, call the capitol of the United States “sacred?” That is the counting house where all goodies are both commandeered from the US taxpayers and then divvied up among the politicians, the civil servants, and the welfare class that keeps them all in power?
It’s not just the salaries and the vacation and the pay, however. There’s an entire PR apparatus, in almost every division of government, dedicated to making you look, and feel, like an actual servant of the public. Ever wonder why there are law enforcement days at Disneyland but never “small business owner” days? Well, it’s because small business owners can’t afford to hire the marketing firms necessary to create an aura of “public service sacrifice.” Remember, public servants need to keep the gravy flowing, and sometimes the peasants need to be reminded how vital those services are–especially when some government services don’t really seem to deliver as promised.
Donald Trump made his living by building hotels and schmoozing the policy makers who were eventually prevailed upon to let him break ground. To do that, he had to develop a brash, confident personality. (Have you ever met a salesman who projected insecurity?) While Trump was providing jobs, and paying development fees, most of those policy types had nothing bad to say about the Donald, but when Donald tried to take “good management” and “efficiency” to government, that’s something like telling the fat lady she can only buy a single jumbo container of Nestle Drumsticks.
Back in 2016, I resolved to do what Victor Davis Hanson has recently been advising all of us to do: say “NO” to woke culture. As a result of ridiculing affirmative action and the murderous bigotry of Louis Farrakhan, I was called a racist. For mocking Stormy Daniels I was called a misogynist. For thinking parents should be free to teach their teenagers traditional sexual morality, I was called a homophobe. These insults, from anonymous Twitter trolls didn’t trouble me that much, but when entire institutions (public education in my case) pick up the torch and surround your home, figuratively, it can be oppressive. I can remember feeling very much like the “unclean,” the “untouchable.” I actually wondered if black families visiting our farm took me to be a racist. It stung a little bit. I married a Greek American woman and my kids joke about being the “brown Rileys.” I really believe the old classic civil rights language because I think it mirrors our Christian obligation to “judge righteously,” by actions and not by appearance. The collective weight of these insults wounded me.
But I can tell you, NOTHING has ever been quite like the visceral hatred leveled against me for merely being there on January 6th. People sent us ugly death threats. They threatened to burn down our homes. They wanted me to rot in jail for decades and they encouraged the FBI to take steps. My wife took to arming herself, something she never had to consider during the “woke” storm.
Think about that. Progressives claim to hate racism, bigotry, homophobia, and misogyny, but you know what they really hate? They hate anyone considered even a remote threat to their beloved state — their juice-giving god. Ponder the whole class of people who see some claim on the state as their long term security, whether it is aid to families with children, or state pensions, or subsidized crop insurance, or identity-based employment, or outright corruption itself, there are people who have secured a place at the sow’s belly, and woe to anyone who imperils the milky flow.
So imagine Donald Trump–entrepreneur developer–facing an urban jury, or a J6, Capitol-strolling grandma pondering a DC prosecutor?
Some of these juries are out for blood. J6ers are the enemy of their six week vacation, their twelve federal holidays, and their early, cushy retirement. Even from the sidelines, the progressive religionists are being threatened. There’s a certain sort of unemployed gender studies major who sees her future nestled up against the government teat, getting good pay for pondering identity confusion theory.
A guy out there on the capitol grounds demanding fair elections and voter ID?
Drawing and quartering would be too kind.
