Left Jabs

I’m not sure I’d want to be held accountable for anything I wrote at fifteen years old, not that I remember much. But I’m quite sure I never, then or since, spoke up in defense of militia movements. Especially not in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. But then, I never had a regular column in my hometown newspaper. Josh Hawley did. Lexington MO. Age fifteen. A precocious brat even then, he was sure that “Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped.” He goes on to say that a lot of Americans were “drawn to anti-government organizations” out of “genuine concerns” about federal overreach. Right. Timothy McVeigh, wiring up his bomb, all verklempt about federal overreach. Young Josh also used this small-town forum to stand up for Mark Fuhrman. Remember him? The L.A. cop who became famous for his racial slurs, which were testified to in ...

I am reasonably confident that the presence of 20,000 troops in the streets of Washington will prove enough to get Joe Biden inaugurated tomorrow. I am less confident that a selection of state capitals will see an outcome so felicitous. But then I live in Michigan, where our statehouse has already been defiled by the same menagerie of gun nuts, white supremacists, and religious cranks who’ve just gone national in such deranged fashion. My own state attorney general, in a refreshing bit of candor, told us point blank: “The Michigan Capitol is not safe.” Several days ago, I gave up trying to write a single coherent post about the most incoherent two weeks of my lifetime. Instead, I’m resorting to a sort of random spew — a fitting analogy for the last four years. So, in no particular order, a few takeaways: Defined by Stupid Whoever heard of a popular uprising based entirely on lies and disinformation, without a shred of underlying factual content in evidence? History usuall...

I got some pushback on my post from last Tuesday. It was the day before the Capitol insurrection (or whatever history plans on calling it). In that post, I urged career civil servants to come forward and report any felonies that Trump appointees might commit as they slither out the door. The pushback came from a Canadian friend who was rightly concerned that this is a slippery slope. That history is littered with regime changes that have triggered vicious persecution against whichever faction has just lost power. That this cycle of retribution is endemic even to elected democracies, and often signals the end of them. That there’s a thin line between whistleblowing and informing, which he feared I might be crossing. All of which is true and demonstrable. But I think we’re now dealing with something more. What most of us want to see, I think, isn’t so much retribution as it is accountability. We want to see people held responsible for their actions. There is a large and growing app...

An Open Letter to Career Civil Servants: We need your help putting the country back together. We need you to tell us what you saw, and who you saw doing it. We need a return to accountability, which means holding the people who are even now subverting our government — not to mention our democracy — accountable. We know that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of crimes were committed in the last four years, but we have only the bare outlines of who, what, when, where, and how. We need you to fill in the blanks. We address you as career civil servants, not to categorize you, but to distinguish you from the hacks and ideologues you’ve been forced to report to and work with. We know they were imposed on you. We assume you weren’t happy about it. You’re the ones who understood how your agencies were supposed to run, regardless of the party in power. You’re the ones who were forced to implement outrageous changes in policies and procedures, all with underlying political agendas. Who were...