The Boys Who Cried Corruption
The Playbook To Get Some Stability Around Here
I am known to friend and foe alike as someone always ready to predict history is about to crash down on us again.
Keeping an eye on us can be a mitzvah
At the moment, the federal government has taken control of the National Guard, which states are supposed to control. It’s in Los Angeles along with 9,000 marines, who aren’t supposed to be patrolling American cities. They’re there to “quell” protests against arresting people without due process, but the people are not supposed to be there, either. It’s a mess. It’s said to be necessary to rid us of violent immigrants, or just immigrants or, apparently worse than that, antifa.
The retribution isn’t altogether novel. Street arrests and the appearance of the military in a nation’s neighborhood sometimes are a climatic chapter in a well-worn playbook.
See: Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Nayib Bukele called a state of emergency and suspended civil liberties to combat gang violence in El Salvador. His take: arrests of an estimated 75,000 supposed gang members (about 12% of the country’s 6.33 million people).
Xi began his mass arrests and tightened controls in service of an anti-corruption campaign. Erdogan purged the military, judiciary and academia because order, waste and, not least, corruption demanded it. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte did the same to end drug crime and, while he was at it, expand his power. Putin did it to rebuild the state and, yes, make Russia great again.
Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s predecessor had already cracked down on the press and dissent, but el-Sisi’s crackdowns still had corruption, terrorism, and governmental waste to call out troops to crush.
In Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman purged the country’s elite to end corruption, eliminate waste, modernize the state and solidify his power.
Zimbabwe? Emmerson Mnangagwa was known for his ruthlessness (his nickname: “The Crocodile”). He justified leading a coup eight years ago in part to attract investment and root out corruption. He’s won two dubious elections since, and as this is written, is chasing down army veterans who oppose his corruption. Corruption was the reason Kais Saled suspended Tunisia’s parliament and judiciary. Securing stability and controlling what must be awesomely persistent corruption remain the reasons Yoweri Museveni has felt the need to hang onto power in Uganda since 1986.
Evidence, we know, is just one of those leftist niceties anyway. So the evidence of actual corruption remains ephemeral in many of these takedowns. But the blatant chicanery and duplicity of secretive enemies of the state was just too provocative to ignore. Many of the jailed and restricted – murdered in some cases – share guilt primarily of having the bad taste of being political opponents.
Happily, heroes like Orban, Xi, el-Sisi and the others have the talent to see what most of the rest of us cannot.
Throw various secretaries of Health & Human Services, Defense, State, Justice, etc., into the talent pool and you can see another way America truly is exceptional. In just six months, they’ve turned much of America’s domestic policy to ending, well, corruption, crime, and waste. Being better than most, they also need to end fraud, cancel culture and taxes, disloyalty, gender dysphoria, unwanted pregnancies, unhealthy impulses to inclusiveness, excessive belief in climate change, and disturbingly universal suffrage. Moreover, they got into power, and discovered everything was weaponized. That had to end, too.
And deploying military solutions for problems beyond dissent may be required. Our derangement syndromes clearly need to be addressed. A tough, resilient problem, but nothing a term under the watchful eye of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador couldn’t solve.
Once again, I’m a worry wart. But I wonder if we might soon hear that our leaders have thrown up their hands and declared another national emergency. We’ve come just one protest short of qualifying for a cleansing dose of martial law. America may not be at its greatest all of the time, and the playbook says something’s got to be done about it soon.