By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, June 02, 2025
It is easy to make fun of Dan Bongino, the emotionally
incontinent former cop turned podcaster appointed for some inexplicable reason
by Donald Trump to serve as deputy director of the FBI as a subordinate to Kash
Patel, whose main qualification for the job was having been the author of … a children’s
book about the Steele dossier, a fact that sounds
totally made-up but that is totally not made-up.
And it is a good week for making fun of Bongino, who
recently had a
public emotional breakdown on Fox News—where else?—about how he “gave up
everything” to take on a thankless job in public service. About which: Bro, you
gave up a podcast. Bongino went on to say that the job was so hard that he was
now divorced from his wife, only to realize that he didn’t exactly mean what he
said. The bombastic mode of speech that is apparently obligatory in Trump’s
orbit had served him poorly, and so he corrected himself: “separated.” But he
didn’t mean “separated” the way it sounds when it is used in conjunction with
“divorce.” He just meant that he’s spending a lot of time at the office away
from his family.
“I gave up everything,” the poor dear says. But how did
he get that everything he’s missing? As much fun as it is to make fun of
social-media tough-guy crybabies such as Bongino, there is a more serious point
in there.
I believe the first time I wrote
about Bongino was after he decided to be a radical
libertarian for five minutes and declared: “Taxation is theft.” And “Taxation
Is Theft” is a very strange slogan for a man who had spent almost the entirety
of his career as a tax-eater, happily enjoying a salary and generous benefits
paid for by—maybe he didn’t know?—taxation. Not only was Bongino a
taxpayer-supported public employee, he was a member of the very class of
taxpayer-supported public employees—cops—that they send to your house if you
decide to take “Taxation Is Theft” seriously and resist the thieves. (We may dress
our police up as commandos and tell them that they are “at war” with drugs or
gangs or whatever, but, in reality, they are mostly tax
collectors of one kind or another.) Radical rhetoric like “Taxation Is
Theft” is tempting, and I have overindulged in it myself from time to time,
although there is a key difference between me and Bongino on this matter:
I believe it.
(I don’t want to go off on a whole thing about my own
political ideas here, but the short version is that I think that any healthy
society consisting of more than about fifteen people is going to be
characterized not by the pursuit of perfect justice but by the prudent,
thankless, and unsatisfying work of balancing competing injustices; taxation is
a real and meaningful violation of property rights necessitated by other even
more unpleasant realities such as the practical requirements of collective self-defense.
Philosophically, I’m adjacent to the anarcho-capitalists; practically, I’m an
Eisenhower Republican, which is one of the reasons I haven’t had anything to do
with the thing that still calls itself the Republican Party for about 20 years
now.)
Bongino, by most accounts, was a competent and dutiful if
not particularly distinguished policeman with the NYPD and a similarly
competent and dutiful if not particularly distinguished Secret Service agent.
(The radical libertarian in me agrees with the Eisenhower Republican in me that
“Secret Service” is a terrible, wildly inappropriate name for a police agency
in a free society. But never mind that for now.) Bongino may inflate his past
importance from time to time, but there isn’t anything in the world wrong with
being an ordinary government employee who tries his best to do a good job—we’d
be a lot better off if there were more of them trying their best.
And there isn’t anything wrong with cashing in on that
experience by means of a private-sector career later in life, which Bongino has
done, by his own telling, quite splendidly. While it is not the case
that most people in government are taking a huge pay cut vs. their likely
private-sector earnings as a generous and patriotic act of public service (accounting
for total real compensation, many people in the public sector earn much
more than they likely would in private industry), the possibility of using a
career in government to acquire experience, relationships, and prestige that
can be monetized later in life is part of the deal for a lot of good people who
go into government work, and, again, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong or
dishonorable about that.
But that is The Swamp.
That’s how Washington works, mostly. People don’t get
paid from shadowy backroom deals and anonymous calls on burner phones. You work
for the Fed as a bank regulator for ten years, work on the other side at a bank
for five or ten more, go back to the Fed or some other agency in a more senior
role, and then back to the private sector in a high-level position. Maybe there
are a few more steps in the back-and-forth, but that’s the standard practice.
What Bongino is doing—and whining about!—is the swamp-thing two-step.
Gross quid pro quo corruption is not unheard of in
Washington—Sen. Robert Menendez richly deserved his bribery
sentence and probably should have received a longer
one if only for embarrassing Americans by publicly demonstrating how a senator
may be had so cheaply—but it is much rarer than many people assume. What
people think of as corrupt—morally if not legally—is the swampy revolving-door
career path, the exploitation of one’s former position and contacts to make
money in a purely self-interested way after leaving government—or, as in
Bongino’s case, between feeding sessions while tearily attached to the
taxpayers’ teat.
We want good people in government. And let’s assume that
Bongino the cop and Secret Service agent was a man of more integrity and higher
character than Bongino the media celebrity and full-time, knee-walking,
gormless Trump sycophant. Respectable work in the NYPD and the Secret Service
is perfectly honorable, and we ought not to sneer at it or begrudge former
policemen or federal agents some book royalties or podcasting revenue. But: Are
there no honorable men and women in the FDA? Working for the Federal Reserve?
In the DOJ? At HUD? Beavering away in the basements at Treasury or HHS? No
honorable Hill staffers? No honorable Democrats? Of course there are. And when
they go on to cushy academic appointments or lucrative lobbying careers or
whatever, and then maybe parlay that private-sector success into even more
senior government posts conferring prestige and influence that can later be
milked upon returning to the private sector, that tangled mess of relationships
and mixed-up financial incentives is what Bongino and others like him call The
Swamp.
If anything, the Hill staffers and ex-bureaucrats are, as
a group, probably less corrupt than are those employed in the agencies where
Bongino had his career: NYPD has been infected by such wild corruption at
points in its long history that certain of its constituents have been
indistinguishable from organized-crime syndicates—within my lifetime, we have
had NYPD
officers acting as Mafia hitmen, while the catalogue of scandal at the
Secret Service is long
and amusingly pornographic. Bongino is hardly the first NYPD
veteran or Secret
Service agent to cynically cash in.
The question that interests me—and I do not mean this
facetiously—is whether Bongino and others like him are simply too stupid to
understand that they are The Swamp.
For example, Bongino has
described the FBI—the agency he is entrusted with helping to lead—as
“irredeemably corrupt.” As I wrote above, these guys all talk like idiots
who have just watched Glengarry Glen Ross for the 55th time,
and it is probably the case that Bongino’s rhetorical flourishes have once
again carried him away. If he genuinely believed that the FBI was irredeemably
corrupt, then he would not waste his time on the impossible project of trying
to reform it, if he were a man of integrity acting in good faith. Irredeemably
means something. On the other hand, if he were a purely cynical and
self-serving calculator, then doing a stint at the FBI would be worth
something: A dishonest man coming out of a senior management role at the FBI
could milk the conspiracy nuts and rage-monkeys for millions in book sales and
appearance fees promising to expose the secrets that “they—THEY—don’t want you
to know.”
My guess is that, yes, Bongino belongs to the set of
those who are too stupid to understand. I do not think that such energetic,
sanctimonious, and utterly unexamined self-righteousness is the kind of thing
that even a genuinely wicked person can fake for so long. Even as they grab
money with both hands as fast as they can like a contestant in a money booth
on some grotesque game show, there is a genuine sense among these Trump
sycophants that what they do isn’t corrupt when they do it. Trump’s own
brazen campaign of personal
enrichment is the sort of thing that would have given
Bongino an aneurysm if Joe Biden had been doing it, as is the administration’s
frank policy of more or less auctioning off pardons in exchange for money and
favors. There is no crime that cannot be set aside for Trump supporters: Ed
Martin, Trump’s pardon attorney, unapologetically
described the administration’s policy: “No MAGA left
behind.” That includes corrupt former cops such as Scott Jenkins, a former
Virginia sheriff convicted
of taking bribes, as well as men on the other side of the law such as Larry
Hoover, the founder
of what is arguably the single most significant
criminal enterprise in these United States, a gang whose many affiliates and offshoots (maybe you’ve heard of the Crips?) are responsible for who
knows how many thousands of murders.
Corrupt cops, Chicago gangsters—put on the dopey red cap
(or, in Hoover’s case, have Kanye West wear the cap on your behalf) and you’re
above the law, at least as a federal matter. (Like Donald Trump, Larry Hoover
still has state-level legal issues outstanding.)
That’s outrageous stuff, to be sure. But what about more
ordinary swampery? What should we do about it? Should we do anything about it?
I don’t know that there is much that could be done: The Obama administration
tried to put a brake on the revolving door by means of executive orders and
barring lobbyists from certain senior roles—a policy
that did not survive very much contact with the facts of Washington life.
Trump had a similar rule and rescinded
it on his last day in office, because that’s the kind of cowardly fink he
is. And, in a free society with a dynamic economy, people are going to move
around and do a lot of different things—this isn’t life in some 19th
century European country or Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s Custom-House, where a clerk in a government office expects, and
is expected to, remain there for life.
Words about Words
From “The Custom-House,” the preface to The Scarlet
Letter:
I doubt greatly—or, rather, I do
not doubt at all—whether any public functionary of the United States, either in
the civil or military line, has ever had such a patriarchal body of veterans
under his orders as myself. The whereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was at
once settled, when I looked at them. For upwards of twenty years before this
epoch, the independent position of the Collector had kept the Salem
Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes the
tenure of office generally so fragile. A soldier,—New England’s most
distinguished soldier,—he stood firmly on the pedestal of his gallant services;
and, himself secure in the wise liberality of the successive administrations
through which he had held office, he had been the safety of his subordinates in
many an hour of danger and heart-quake. General Miller was radically
conservative; a man over whose kindly nature habit had no slight influence;
attaching himself strongly to familiar faces, and with difficulty moved to
change, even when change might have brought unquestionable improvement. Thus,
on taking charge of my department, I found few but aged men. They were ancient
sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tost on every sea, and
standing up sturdily against life’s tempestuous blasts, had finally drifted
into this quiet nook; where, with little to disturb them, except the periodical
terrors of a Presidential election, they one and all acquired a new lease of
existence. Though by no means less liable than their fellow-men to age and
infirmity, they had evidently some talisman or other that kept death at bay.
Two or three of their number, as I was assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or
perhaps bedridden, never dreamed of making their appearance at the
Custom-House, during a large part of the year; but, after a torpid winter,
would creep out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what
they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience, betake themselves
to bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge of abbreviating the official
breath of more than one of these venerable servants of the republic. They were
allowed, on my representation, to rest from their arduous labors, and soon
afterwards—as if their sole principle of life had been zeal for their country’s
service, as I verily believe it was—withdrew to a better world. It is a pious
consolation to me, that, through my interference, a sufficient space was
allowed them for repentance of the evil and corrupt practices into which, as a
matter of course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall. Neither
the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to
Paradise.
The greater part of my officers
were Whigs. It was well for their venerable brotherhood that the new Surveyor
was not a politician, and though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither
received nor held his office with any reference to political services. Had it
been otherwise,—had an active politician been put into this influential post,
to assume the easy task of making head against a Whig Collector, whose
infirmities withheld him from the personal administration of his office,—hardly
a man of the old corps would have drawn the breath of official life, within a
month after the exterminating angel had come up the Custom-House steps.
According to the received code in such matters, it would have been nothing
short of duty, in a politician, to bring every one of those white heads under
the axe of the guillotine. It was plain enough to discern, that the old fellows
dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and at the same time
amused me, to behold the terrors that attended my advent; to see a furrowed
cheek, weather-beaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the glance
of so harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as one or another addressed
me, the tremor of a voice, which, in long-past days, had been wont to bellow
through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely enough to frighten Boreas himself to
silence. They knew, these excellent old persons, that, by all established
rule,—and, as regarded some of them, weighed by their own lack of efficiency
for business,—they ought to have given place to younger men, more orthodox in
politics, and altogether fitter than themselves to serve our common Uncle. I
knew it too, but could never quite find in my heart to act upon the knowledge.
As Ezra Pound once put it: “Literature is news that stays
news.”
More Wordiness
Some questions answer themselves: “Do talking animals
deserve human rights?” asks a headline over at Salon. Well, what
kind of rights? Also: There are no talking animals.
And Furthermore …
The fashion critic over at the New York Times begs
the question: “The idea that any designer has a say over who wears its
clothes is kind of foolish, given that if someone can afford an item, they can
simply walk into a store and buy it. At the same time, it is fashion’s job to
respond to social and political currents.”
Why?
Why should it be “fashion’s job to respond to social and
political currents”? Why shouldn’t clothing designers and sellers spend their
professional time designing and selling clothes—acting within their areas of
competency—rather than monkeying around in politics, where they have no special
competency? We see this all over the place, with different professions and
institutions being asked to take on this or that unrelated issue. The National
Poetry Foundation broke
itself against the rocks of race politics—and, given the state of national
poetry, it could hardly afford to broaden its focus. Architects’ professional
associations insist that their members must take the lead on climate issues,
which might seem to make a little sense until you learn how few buildings are
built with any input from an architect, how little influence architects have
over their clients, how little all of the green bells and whistles actually
contribute to the energy efficiency of modern buildings, etc. Many car
companies have taken a meat ax to their own margins by getting carried away
with the green stuff, too, trying
to force electric cars on customers who do not desire
them. Humanities departments have ruined themselves with politicized curricula
and voguish social-justice nonsense. So many journalists have gotten caught up
in saving the world that they forgot how to report the news and make money
publishing newspapers.
There isn’t any inherent reason fashion can’t be ars
gratia artis (et pecuniae). Yohji Yamamoto, who has a real genius
for clothing, has been heard to scoff at the notion he is some kind of artist.
As he once
said. “I am a dressmaker!”
I do not know a great deal about fashion designers. I
know a little about poets. And do you know what kind of poet gets most caught
up in social activism? The mediocre kind. I suspect the same is true for many
other creative (and less creative) occupations: The middling kind of writer or
academic or designer doesn’t produce the kind of work that offers much of
interest in itself, and so it must be supported by the prosthetics of politics
and political activism.
Economics for English Majors
It’s TACO time!
President Donald Trump traveled
to Pittsburgh Friday to celebrate a deal he once vowed to oppose—Japanese
steelmaker Nippon Steel’s long-announced plans to buy iconic American
steelmaker US Steel.
“We’re going to be so successful.
You have just, you have just started, you watch, we’re here today to celebrate
a blockbuster agreement that will ensure this storied American company stays
and American company, you’re going to stay in American company,” Trump said at
a US Steel plant just outside of Pittsburgh, before an audience of steelworkers
in hard hats and safety vests.
And he also announced he is increasing
the tariff on imported steel from 25% to 50%.
There’s an interesting twist—a big tax on Americans to
protect Japanese steel interests. Weird kind of protectionism, dude.
Trump insists that what’s going on with Nippon Steel and
U.S. Steel is a “partnership.” It’s not—Nippon Steel is buying U.S. Steel, as
planned.
Years ago, I got chewed out—and, I suspect, very nearly
fired—when I wrote a headline at the Lubbock Avalanche Journal dutifully
reporting that a local bank was being acquired by another bigger bank. The head
of the local bank—a big advertiser at the time—was furious, and called my
editor to complain. His bank wasn’t being acquired, he complained, it
was a “merger of equals.” That bank was called Norwest. I don’t think many of
you will have heard of it.
Have you heard of Wells Fargo?
Merger of equals. Sure.
In Closing
Jay Nordlinger, reporting from the
Oslo Freedom Forum:
Speaking of assimilation: I’m
about to cross the street. I have one foot in the road. But then I catch
myself. There are children, waiting with their parents, on my side. There are
children on the other side, too—waiting with their parents. There is not a car
in sight. But the light is against us. And these people are finna wait till the
light turns green, come what may.
My American feet itch to cross.
But I cannot set a bad example for the children. (“Mommy, why is that
man doing that?”) So I wait, dutifully.
So unnatural. But I’m
trying to be a good Norwegian, or a good visitor …
I had the same experience in Zurich at 3 a.m., with
adults coming home from a rave rather than with children. The light says wait,
and wait they will. I don’t hate that aspect of Swiss culture or of
Scandinavian culture; in fact, I admire it. But I kind of suspect it is why
they don’t have our venture-capital industry and haven’t been to the moon.
In the wee hours, Zurich after Street Parade—in which a
million people come to the Swiss city (pop. 423,000) to dance to techno music
and do most of the things that go along with that—looks a little like New
Orleans after Mardi Gras. But when I got up to go to church the next morning,
Zurich looked like … Zurich, as though nothing had ever happened.
The social planners dream of picking and choosing from
various national characteristics and institutions and, at the worst, delude
themselves into thinking that they can: We want the American start-up economy,
the Swiss health-care system, the Finnish school system, Hong Kong’s public
transport, the United Kingdom’s newspapers, Germany’s factories, Singapore’s
bureaucracy. We want to somehow have Iceland’s natural beauty together with
Houston’s zoning laws. The people who are skeptical of the social planners know
that cultures are package deals. You want Dubai, you get … all of Dubai.
You want Texas, you get … Texas, for better and for worse.
Norway is lovely. And it works well enough for the
Norwegians. If you haven’t been to Oslo, I recommend it.
Bring money.
No comments:
Post a Comment