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ymeskhout  10mo ago (text post)   2937 thread views

The Bailey Podcast E035: Ray Epps Does Jay Six

Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and RSS.

In this episode, we talk about the deep state, J6, and Ray Epps.

Participants: Yassine, Shakesneer.

Links:

Jack Posobiec's Pipe Bomb Allegation (Twitter)

Pipe Bombs in Washington DC (FBI)

Meet Ray Epps: The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears to Have Led the Very First 1/6 Attack on the US Capitol (Revolver)

Social Media Influencer Charged with Election Interference Stemming from Voter Disinformation Campaign (DOJ)

'I started a riot for the sitting president': Why Ali Alexander won't go to jail for his role in Jan. 6 (Raw Story)

J6 Select Committee Interview of Ray Epps

Ray Epps Defense Sentencing Memo (Courtlistener)

Proud Boys Sentencing Memos (Courtlistener)

Wishing For Entrapment (Yassine Meskhout)

Recorded 2024-01-19 | Uploaded 2024-01-22

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What's the evidence that Clinton administration stuffed DC bureaucracy with partisans? The number of federal employees declined significantly by around 340,000 or 11% over the Clinton years. I really have trouble following these arguments because I can't tell what the premises are based on, or even what they mean (e.g. what is conservatism and how did Obama claim it was dead?). This was the advantage of a real-time conversation, because I was able to ask clarifying questions for every point.

When Obama was elected, Democrats were, understandably on a high, and while I can't point stats my sense of the national mood was that the younger Boomer Liberalism that first assumed power under Clinton considered itself victoroious in the culture war (and it was!) and this was reflected with unusual smugness. A new generation was in charge, and they were "on the right side of history." There were some prominent books and articles that got a lot of talk radio play in the wake of Obama's election, like the uncreatively titled "The Death of Conservatism" by Sam Tanenhaus (2009, The New Republic) and "The Death of Conservatism" by Lee Siegel (2009, The Daily Beast). Even quasi-conservative Andrew Sullivan got into it with a book titled "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back." More self-eulogizing from conservatives in "The Death of Conservatism: A Movement and Its Consequences" edited by Lee Edwards (2011).

As for the ideological composition of the federal workforce, the size doesn't matter as much as who made up the ranks. I asked ChatGPT and it responded with this:

One notable initiative in this regard was the National Performance Review (NPR), also known as the Reinventing Government initiative. Led by Vice President Al Gore, the NPR sought to make government more efficient, customer-focused, and results-oriented. It aimed to eliminate waste, reduce bureaucracy, and improve the delivery of government services.

While the NPR did involve workforce reforms, such as encouraging early retirements and implementing performance-based management systems, the primary goal was not age-based replacement but rather improving the overall effectiveness of the federal workforce. The initiative emphasized the importance of attracting and retaining talented employees, regardless of age, and creating a culture of innovation and accountability within the government.

Additionally, the Clinton Administration supported initiatives to promote diversity and equal opportunity in the federal workforce, including efforts to recruit and retain a diverse range of employees across age groups, backgrounds, and demographics.

Obviously, there is not going to be a stated purpose in these initiatives to replace older workers with young democrats, but there is going to be a natural influx of Democrats in such an environment led by party operatives, especially with diversity initiatives driving part of it.

I don't think the Deep State segment would've have gone any differently if this is the theory that was deployed. A bunch of books claiming the death of a political movement are the norm for any era, and the NPR program you mention appears to be the one responsible for eliminating over 250,000 federal jobs. I would've asked very similar clarifying questions because I don't see how you go between "250k federal jobs eliminated" to "also older workers were replaced by younger democrats" (citation needed) and then to "these new federal employees continued to pursue Democratic Party goals for the next 20 years, including during Bush era" (citation needed) and then "this Clinton era group was particularly activated in opposition to Trump because of fears he'd shuffle LGBTQ and brown people into camps" (citation needed) and so on. This illustrates the benefits of a real time conversation in dissecting these claims.

What's the evidence that Clinton administration stuffed DC bureaucracy with partisans? The number of federal employees declined significantly by around 340,000 or 11% over the Clinton years.

This is a terrible metric to discuss the question. What does the number of federal employees have to do with anything? The only publicly available data (at least I think it's publicly available, since people post fancy charts with that every once in a while) I'm aware of that could maybe resolve the question one way or the other, is which party the political donations of the employees went to, and if that changed over the Clinton years.

I wasn't given a metric for the phrase "purposeful stocking of the DC bureaucracy with partisans" so I went and looked for my own. Coming up with your own interpretation is a natural response when encountering an ambiguous statement. Even if we establish that political donations among federal employees shifted between 1993 and 2001, how do we rule out other causes besides whatever "purposeful stocking" was supposed to mean?

If you're going to criticize political donations data for not answering the question of whether the hiring and firing decisions that made it so were purposeful, it makes even less sense for you to put forward the number of federal employees as a metric, as it cannot prove or disprove the purposeful nature of the shift, nor there even being a shift in the first place.

Mostly I'm just annoyed at the rat sphere's insistence on quantitative analysis, and it is the next exhibit in the case for dropping the entire framework in political debates. There's no guarantee something will even be arguable with quantitative data in the abstract, in the case it will be, there's no guarantee the data will be gathered, if it is, there's no guarantee it will be available to the public, so expecting someone to actively provide it to back their argument makes no sense. It makes even less sense to act like dropping some random number not even related to the question provides a valid counter argument. It's fine if you want to ask why he think Clinton stocked the federal bureaucracies with supporters, but then just ask that, instead of doing this weird dance with "evidence" that can't even answer the question.

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