On Getting In Between the Hogs and the Bucket

Introduction

So then, Elon is making a scene, and I think we should analyze it.

It might even be said that he is on a spree—on a bender that his given over to an out-of-control sense of fiscal responsibility. But I don’t think we should over-analyze this because the whole thing is pretty simple, when you come down to it.

All that noise is coming from the barnyard because Elon went out there and has gotten in between the hogs and the bucket.

What This Certainly Isn’t, At Least Not Yet

Salon has been trying to spook everybody by claiming that Musk is running cover for a surreptitious behind-the-scenes takeover by those skeery scary skeery Christian nationalists. They cite Russ Vought, for example, the new head of the OMB. But I appeared together with Russ on a panel once . . . he was a very nice man and no dripping fangs were visible at all.

But what is true is this. Once the diseased corruption and moonbeam insanity is purged from the government, which is what Musk is doing, then there will be a lot more openness to influence from believing Christians. That’s true enough because Christianity really is opposed to diseased corruption and moonbeam insanity. This is a feature, not a bug. And if the infusion of large numbers of Christians into the government results in greater stability and right-side-up governance, and high federal officials stop stealing people’s luggage at airports, the electorate can then decide if they want to continue down the path of such reform. My hope is that Salon will make their peace with democratic reforms undertaken by democratic means.

Principles of War

I recently mentioned one of the principles of war it applied to this Trump destructo-era, and that was the principle of pursuit. But there is another principle that is worth considering as well, and it is right at the center of what Elon is all about. That principle is the principle of communication, but don’t let the connotations of the word mislead you. Communication as a principle of war involves much more than simply transferring information. It does include that, but there is much more. Think supply lines.

What Elon is doing is cutting the left’s supply lines, and he is cutting those supply lines clean in two. It is starting to look as though the leftist juggernaut was made up of ensconced bureaucrats, kennel-fed media, and astro-turf mobs, and all of it financed by the long-suffering taxpayer. The right-of-center populace was having trouble raising support for their side of the culture war because it turns out they were having to finance both sides of the culture war. If I might, I would like to repurpose a popular meme about conflict in the Middle East, and point out (somewhat mildly) that it appears to apply to a certain extent to our domestic conflicts also—although domestically, while one side is privately-funded, the money is ultimately all coming from the same folks.

But when the supply lines are cut, this brings the conflict down to a much more primal level. It makes things much more personal.

A Primal Conflict

This is now a fundamental clash, a primal conflict. Although ideology helped set up and frame the whole thing, at the end of the day this is now a battle over livelihoods. An entire way of life for an entire cohort of the population is on the verge of disappearing. Tens of thousands of climbers and strivers went to the Ivies, and graduated from prestigious law schools, and then they got a job at a well-connected NGO, and there were rivers of money. Countless careers were being built, all along the waterfront. In the evening, at the end of a hard day helping Namibians try to understand the glories of transgenderism, they could go sit on the deck with a drink in hand, and then after dinner go skiing on the people’s money.

All of that is about to go away. The fighting that we are going to see from many in the establishment now is a fight for survival. Not a fight for a party, or a platform, or an agenda, but rather a fight for a way of life that had gotten pretty darn cozy.

And this helps us to understand the nature of the scene that is unfolding in front of us. As the purge of government workers continues apace, look for a great upsurge in “personal interest” journalism, where story after story will highlight the plight of wives who “don’t know what we are going to do this Christmas,” or “how we will pay our mortgage,” or “what my Tom is going to be able to do.”

The same kind of personal interest journalism somehow rarely occurred when the EPA was destroying the livelihood of West Virginia coal miners, or activists blew up the jobs of the men who were going to build the Keystone Pipeline, or defense cuts affected shipyard workers building aircraft carriers. They were all supposed to learn how to code.

The only point here is that the conflict used to be against entrenched leftists, who fought from a position of security for ideological reasons. They will now be fighting from a position of insecurity for personal reasons. Such a conflict is likely to be a lot more visceral and, believe it or not, a lot more irrational.

The Epistemological Ramifications of a Salary

Whenever someone is making no sense whatever, a reasonable thing to do is to look around to see if that person is being paid to make no sense. There are stupid people in the world who will always make no sense for free, but there are also many occasions where otherwise reasonable people are caught up in a situation that makes no sense, and their status quo depends upon that status quo remaining.

Think of a libertarian who has a federal job at that mine shaft in Pennsylvania that stores hard copies of all the files of all retiring federal workers. Of an evening he enjoys reading Murray Rothbard, agreeing with all of it, and he has a circle of friends that gets together weekly at a local tavern to talk about their take on the political scene. Assume also that he is two years away from retirement. Such a man has, at the very least, two sets of motivations. One of them would be the political theory that he entertains in his head, doing so sincerely. The other set of motivations has to do with how he could possibly explain a forced retirement to his wife. The latter motivation is likely to be the stronger one by far.

When the Levee Breaks

There is another motivation for this resistance that should be taken into account, but it is nothing so mundane as wanting “to keep a job.” It is now becoming apparent that large sectors of our federal government are basically a criminal enterprise. We are talking about far more than a cushy job with benefits—we are talking about people getting filthy stinking rich, and all built on the bedrock of dirty deeds. We are talking about more than a few prosecutable offenses.

So some might be wondering why there are people in the establishment defending absurdities. Let us take an example at random, funding that transgender opera in Colombia. Why can’t everybody come together on something like that and say, “Yeah, that was dumb.”

The reason there is a conflict over everything is because everything is connected. The amount of money spent on that opera was chump change, all things considered, and so why do some object to it so strongly and why do others defend it so fiercely? The reason that people object to it is that the public is obviously in the market for hearing stories of absurd and abusive expenditures. It helps the opponents generate more enthusiasm for more cuts.

But why the defenders? Wouldn’t their case for “essential” USAID expenditures be strengthened if they would only show themselves reasonable at some point? Well, no, and here is why.

Experienced pastors have sometimes had to deal with a parishioner who is caught in some sin, and that person was caught dead to rights. But in the cosmic scheme of things, that particular sin, if it were the only thing, could be dealt with in a straightforward manner, and life could return to normal. But somehow the individual resists simple repentance at every turn. Lame excuses, redefinition, flat refusals, all of that. Why the stiff resistance for something so comparatively trivial, and yet so obviously necessary?

The reason is that the person concerned knows about all the other stuff he did. Nobody else knows that, but he does. And he also knows—or feels instinctively—that if he repents of the presenting sin, the whole levee might give way. One breach in the earthworks could easily lead to other things coming out—could lead to the whole river coming through. Let us say that he was caught looking at a Victoria’s Secret web page by his wife. Why can’t he just confess his sin and be done with it? Well, once confession starts, real confession I mean, it might keep on going. He might find himself confessing his adultery of three years prior. He knows all about that, and so can’t afford to risk opening up, even a little. It is like a poker game, where one hand thinks that it is for penny-ante stakes, while the other side knows that it is for a couple million dollars. The penny-ante player is wondering why the other player is sweating profusely, and why his eyes are bulging out. It seems inexplicable.

So a bunch of the resistance to, say, radical cuts in the bureaucracy of the FBI would fall under my first heading. That is simply a fight over a job, over a career. But what would be an example of what I am talking about here? Well, for example, if Kash Patel is confirmed and a thorough house-cleaning occurs at the FBI, we are going to find out an awful lot more about that assassination attempt at Butler. It is quite possible that some FBI operatives are going to go to jail. And, follow me closely here, they don’t want to go to jail.

Death matches in a cage are going to be fierce because they are . . . well, because they are death matches in a cage.

It is Likely Far Worse Than We Have Imagined to Date

When all the revelations are done with their revealing, we will very likely see that it has been far worse that we had assumed. We knew it was bad, but not that bad.

Back when we were a high-trust society many decades ago, such revelations would not have been accepted easily. It would have been too much of a cognitive shock. But we have been prepped. Even though it is likely to be far worse than we thought, we did know that it was going to be bad, and we are no longer vulnerable to the kind of denial that wards off disillusionment. We are already disillusioned, which means that the truth, although surprising, will be something we can come to understand. Denial is no longer a likely response. The likely response is going to be “that is a shock, you know . . . but it figures.”

Like a wife who was pretty sure her husband was cheating on her, and while it is a disappointment to discover the full truth, at the same time she was braced for it, and it comes as a relief to know for sure. The shock came in the fact that it was with an exotic dancer named Bubbles who was also a Russian spy.

Elon’s Security Detail

And as all these things are considered, and carefully weighed in the balances, our thoughts should turn naturally to the hope and prayer that Elon’s security team is as robust as it is possible for a security team to be. Given what is likely at stake in all of this, there is absolutely no reason to think that he wouldn’t be an obvious target for assassination.