Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Part I

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Disorder Breeds Disorder and Civil Society Requires Order: Connecting Global Headlines

Well, today we’re going to talk about foreign policy. We’re going to talk about the FBI and we’re going to talk about cow flatulence. Yes, all three of those are big international headline news stories. This just might be every middle school boy’s favorite edition of The Briefing so far. First we start with foreign policy, and the big issue we need to talk about is the distinction between order and disorder. And as you look at the civilizational pattern, you understand that the very pattern of civilization means the presence of an otherwise inexplicable order where disorder had been. And so as you look at the history of how human beings have related to one another, and you even see this of course, in the Old Testament in particular, you see that bringing order out of disorder is the very sign of the presence of civilization.

And that civilization can be like the ancient Egyptian civilization. Look at the pyramids, still a testimony in stone to the presence and the power of that civilization. And you look at others as well. And of course you have the 19th century in terms particularly of those who were then head of the British Empire looking around the world and recognizing how many empires had risen only to fall. Of course that also happened to the British Empire. And so the rising and falling of empires, the rising and falling of nations, it is a testimony to the fact that order out of disorder brings civilization. But the danger is that that order will fall back into disorder, and that explains much of what’s going on around the globe right now. It is either order coming out of disorder or it is disorder showing itself again in a victory over order.

The disorder of leading headlines right now has to do with civil war in Syria. And that might seem like it’s a story far, far away with very little impact on the United States. But let me just put this into context. Syria has been a troubled part of the Middle East now for decades. And in more recent years, it has been because of the influence of the al-Assad family. The government there in Syria is a totalitarian autocracy centered in one family representing one tribe, and Syria is in part the remnant of an ancient civilization. It is all also the concoction of putting people together in a territory and calling them Syrians, whether they feel themselves to be Syrians or not. What we now call Syria is basically a remnant of the old Ottoman Empire and the fall of that empire, particularly after World War I, just about a century ago led to the development of all kinds of nations, which were at least in part extensions of other empires.

And so what is now Syria was part of the French Mandate as it was known. You had French influence, French political power, and you had the establishment in Syria of a government that was basically under the control of Paris, but that’s now long in the past. And Syria has been a serious hotbed of political instability and political mischief now for the better part of the last half century and more. And much of this has come under the dictatorship exercised by two men, father and son. First of all, Hafez al-Assad who was dictator of Syria from 1971 to 2000, and his son Bashir al-Assad, who was the dictator now and took over from his father after the father’s death in the year 2000. And so about 25 years already in the rule of Bashir al-Assad as dictator. He took over from his father. It is a military dictatorship.

He holds power by commanding the military and being able to repress and to crack down on his own people. But the big headline of course that surprised people over the weekend is that rebels and Syria has been in a civil war now for a matter of years, rebels have gained control of the largest city in Syria by population that is ancient Aleppo. And it does appear, at least in theory that the regime of Bashir al-Assad might fall. And then you have all kinds of things happening such as the Assad regime claiming that the United States is behind this. The United States comes back and says, “No, we are not behind this. We don’t have a side in this matter.” And for one thing that turns out to be probable, indeed it’s quite plausible that the United States doesn’t back either side in this because the rebels have themselves at times been identified as a terrorist group and indeed on some lists they currently are even now.

And they might represent an even greater tie to Iran, which is the larger source of mischief and of terrorism there in that region. And I bring this up because sometimes when you’re looking at one of these developments, there isn’t a good side. When you look at the Assad regime, there is nothing good to say about it. He has cracked down on his own people. Like his father, he’s murdered many of his own people. They represent one clan, the Alawites that are basically now in control of the government. It is a crony government. It is a criminal enterprise. It is itself a source of instability in the region. It is positioned against the United States and against Israel.

Part II

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Rule by Law or Rule by Criminal Gangs: The Stark Reality on the Ground in Troubled Regions

But what could replace it in a coup could be even worse. The rebel group that has taken control of so much of the territory now and wants to topple the Assad regime, it has at times been identified with al-Qaeda. Just think September 11th, 2001, you understand the problem.

But you put this story together with the big headlines coming out about Gaza in terms of Israel’s war against Hamas. What you have in Gaza right now is an ungovernable in an untenable situation, and that is to say that there is no way that Israel is going to allow Hamas to come back into power there in Gaza. That is simply incompatible with the future survival of Israel as a state and they know it. But that’s complicated by the fact that Hamas was actually elected as the government there in Gaza by the Palestinians who had the opportunity to vote, and they voted for Hamas because they were very frustrated with the incompetence of what is known as the Palestinian Authority that had been in power before. And now it appears that there is no legitimate government. There is no legitimate leadership there in Gaza.

And that just points to a huge, huge problem not only for the beleaguered residents there in Gaza, but also for Israel, but beyond Israel for the United States, and frankly for the entire world. It just tells us that a very small piece of land with a very big problem, can become a fuse on a very big bomb that can very quickly involve nations and empires and powers all over the world and dominate the headlines even here in the United States where people say, “What does this have to do with me?” And the fact is that the headlines tell you one way or another the story may have to do with you. Amanda Taub writing in the New York Times tries to offer some historical perspective here, and she points to the fact that what is sometimes left in the aftermath of this kind of military action is not stability, but instability and in particular, an opportunity for what is often defined as criminal governance.

That is to say you just have criminal gangs take over, and you say, what would that look like? Well, it would look like Haiti, the island nation that right now is under control of criminal gangs. And quite frankly, they have more control of the island than any previous government in recent times. And honestly, they’re going to be very difficult to displace. Once you have that kind of anarchy that creates a vacuum, when you have criminal gangs fill that vacuum, guess what? They fill it pretty quickly and they hold onto it pretty tenaciously. The opportunity for something like that to happen in Gaza comes down to the reality that someone is going to establish control. And when you have rival sources of control, you might have something like a civil war, you might have something like gang warfare, but eventually there is going to be some stability brought out of the instability and it might be something worse than what had preceded it.

You have many parts of the world that have had long-term instability. That is to say there is actually no period of time in which internal explanations are sufficient for bringing about any kind of lasting order. Where there has been lasting order in some parts of the world, it has been imposed by some greater power such as an empire or a neighboring power. But there are many parts of the world that are now ungovernable and frankly have been long-term ungovernable. And I think many people in the West, and that includes many Americans and many American Christians don’t understand what an achievement it is that there is order around us. That people stop at stop signs, that people basically obey the laws, that people drive on the right side of the road, that when you call nine one one, someone answers the phone. When you look at the United States of America, there is a navy at sea, there’s an air force in the air.

And even though our government is often inefficient and incompetent, the fact is that it is also on the other hand a wonder. And that’s true at virtually every level of our civilization. And for that we should be thankful, but we need to understand that comes as the product of something, and that something is not just order for the sake of order. It is in our civilizational trajectory, order that has come out of a certain understanding of what it means to be a human being and to recognize, preserve, and honor human dignity. Where you do not have that background, you just might end up with a very different form of regime. You just might end up with Syria. You just might end up with Haiti. You just might end up with what is going to happen in Gaza. And we don’t even at this point know what is going to happen or what even could happen.

So we’ll stay tuned on these issues, but in the meantime, be thankful for a right establishment of order and recognize the horrible costs which come with disorder. 

Part III

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Crisis at the Federal Bureau of Investigation? President-Elect Trump Expresses Desire For Kash Patel to Become Director of the FBI

But speaking of order and disorder, speaking of law and order, let’s go to talk about the FBI because the FBI is in the headlines precisely because the President-elect of the United States, Donald Trump has announced his intention to appoint Kash Patel as the new director of the FBI. That raises a couple of questions. Number one, is the office open? The answer would be no, it is not. Christopher Wray is actually holding that position. The position calls for a ten-year term, or you could say a maximum ten-year term. And Christopher Wray still has time on his term. He was actually appointed to that role by Donald Trump in his first term in office after Trump had fired James Comey as director.

And so the announcement that the President-elect intends to appoint Kash Patel as director also indicates that he simultaneously intends to fire Christopher Wray as the director of the FBI. Now, the conflict between the Trump team and the FBI has been public for a very, very long time. And I’ll just state up front that I think respect for the FBI is at an historic low and it needs to be restored. And I will also state right up front that I believe there are very legitimate concerns about the FBI. The Trump promise or premise is that in appointing someone like Kash Patel who has been a rather severe critic of the FBI, it just might force some necessary change at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Now, it remains to be seen whether or not the President-elect will follow through with this nomination and the firing of Christopher Wray.

If I were thinking about it, I would simply say to Christopher Wray, I would pretty much expect to have to pack your desk very soon. I think that’s just a political fact. But then you also have headlines such as what appeared in the New York Times saying, “A Justice Department bracing for a test of independence.” Devlin Barrett writing this article says that the key test for the Justice Department is whether or not it can establish its independence from the White House, from the President, even from the Department of Justice in terms of operating independently. Well, okay, now we have a civics problem, and I want to talk about this civics problem for just a moment. The civics problem is this. We have three branches of government, not four or five or six. We do not have the legislative, the judicial, the executive, and the FBI. The FBI is under the executive branch of the government.

That’s why a president can fire the director of the FBI. But it’s not just that the FBI is under the executive branch or a part of the executive branch, it is also that the FBI is at least within the giant tent known as the Department of Justice. So at least in theory, the Director of the FBI has some reporting responsibility to the Attorney General of the United States who is after all a member of the President’s cabinet. So the FBI is a part of the executive branch, but one of the controversies in recent decades has been the increasing call, and you see this just implied in that or assumed in that headline story from the New York Times, that somehow the FBI ought to be independent of the White House, but after all, the President is the chief executive and the FBI is part of the executive branch. So how independent can it be?

And it’s not just that. You also have the rise of this giant administrative state, and one of the key issues that is being pressed by the election to a second term of Donald Trump is the fact that he has declared himself the enemy of the deep state. And there are many who don’t want to acknowledge that such a deep state exists. I’ll simply say, “Okay, take out the word deep and just put in administrative state and you see the problem.” This vast federal bureaucracy, and there are claims that it needs to be insulated from political influence, but guess what? The president is elected as the chief executive, and this is part of the executive branch. So we have a huge problem if we acknowledge it, it’s actually on the scale of a constitutional crisis. So we will talk more about the looming clouds of that crisis and the worldview issues implied in that crisis in days to come.

Part IV

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We Need Restored Confidence in the FBI: The Looming Issues Are Huge and the Stakes Are High

We’re simply now going to talk about the FBI because there are some huge issues here that should be of interest to Christians. We’re talking about crime and punishment. We’re talking about threat and the need for intelligence. We’re talking about a fascinating history, so let’s get to it. There was no federal police authority in terms of any kind of national jurisdiction until the year 1908. In 1908, the Bureau of Investigation was established, known as the BOI. That doesn’t translate well into an acronym. Sometimes just the BI that’s even worse. It did not become the Federal Bureau of Investigation until far later. But the FBI, as we know it, is that the FBI established in 1935 as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Why wasn’t there such a thing before? It is because there was resistance to a federal criminal investigation force, a federal police force. The federal government was understood to have certain responsibilities such as ports and borders, et cetera.

But when it came to criminal investigations within the territory of the United States, the state said, “We’ll handle that ourselves. Thank you very much.” The problem is that with the emergence of a modern state that became untenable. Arguably it was already untenable by the time of the Civil War when it became very evident that on both sides you had intelligence networks that had been built up. And by the way, those intelligence networks didn’t simply go away at the end of the war. At the end of the 19th century, there was another problem, and that was the threat of anarchists or anarchism. And there were those who were leading an anarchist movement on both sides of the Atlantic, by the way. And it was an anarchist who assassinated President William McKinley that led to President Theodore Roosevelt moving into the White House. And it was Roosevelt who took actions shortly after McKinley’s assassination to take the lead with Congress in establishing a bureau at the federal level that would conduct criminal investigations, investigations into criminal activities.

And of course, all this just scaled up with, for instance, the first World War. Now, of course, those living it at the time didn’t call it the First World War. They called it the Great War. It was the first major world war in this respect, and the United States was drawn into it. And remember the United States was drawn into it, at least in part because of military intelligence and the American discovery of a telegram from the Germans to the Mexicans in a conspiracy to gain territory from the United States of America, the so-called Zimmermann Telegram. At that time, there was the fear of a vast network of German spies. By the way, that was not entirely without firm basis in the United States. That was amplified again, of course by the time you get to the Second World War. And so the FBI, which came out of the Bureau of investigation and was formally established by Congress and the act of the President in 1935, the FBI was assigned the responsibility primarily for intelligence.

That is the federal Bureau of intelligence. Sometimes we don’t pause to ask, “Why is it called that?” Well, it’s called that for the same reason CIA is the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA has responsibility outside the United States when it comes to preventing espionage and quite frankly, conducting an intelligence operation or system of operations. The FBI was intended to be similar here in the United States, and you also had the rise and the complexity of the Federal Criminal Code. And this included developments such as what took place with the development of the Mann Act. That’s M-A-N-N Act in 1910, which criminalized the process of human trafficking or the crime of human trafficking in such a way that for instance, running a house of prostitution across state lines, if people were involved in activity between state lines, that could bring in federal charges. And that vastly expanded the reach of criminal investigations in the United States.

Add to that, of course, the rise of organized crime. Think of the massive crime syndicates that emerged during the 1920s and ’30s. Think of the massive rise in crime and very famous criminals, whether it was George Machine Gun Kelly or Babyface Nelson. If it was, you could just go down the list. And you think about the fact the FBI becomes indispensable In the United States. You have the continuation of state responsibility for the prosecution of state crimes. But by the time you get to the middle of the 20th century, virtually everyone accepts the fact that in a very dangerous world, the United States needs something like the FBI. And by the way, there’s something also interesting here. When you look at FBI agents, the senior agents are often referred to as special agents. Now, what makes them special? It’s just like every grandmother thinks you’re special. But what does special mean in this sense?

It means they were specialized in terms of their knowledge and background and their assignment. Special in that sense. It’s one of the reasons why if you want to be hired as an FBI agent and you want to advance in that world, you probably need an advanced degree in some area of specialization because the top ranks are known as special agents. But one of the big issues here is who will control the FBI? The founding director of the FBI, he’d been with the Bureau of investigation beginning in 1924 as J. Edgar Hoover. The building’s named for him, the headquarters of the FBI. He continued until 1972. He was heroic in the American mind as a heroic titanic crime fighter. And it was also discovered, certainly revealed nationally after his death that he had also been largely corrupt, using the power of the FBI to his own political advantage, most importantly, keeping himself in office.

It also turned out there were other colorful complexities to the life of J. Edgar Hoover, and that was sufficient for Congress to put in a 10-year limit on directors. But it gets back to the constitutional problem, just how independent can the FBI be? And it points to the fact that many conservatives, for very good reason, have been concerned for a very long time about the rise of something like the administrative state. That’s what President Trump means when he says deep state. That actually exists largely for its own purposes and exercises its authority to its own ends. And part of this is just an overarching, overly populated and overly powerful administration through bureaucracies, but a part of it is deeper and darker. And the closer you get to the investigation of criminal activity, you can understand the more difficult this would become. We need to be thankful for the FBI for the good work it does in so many areas.

And of course, by the time you get to modern FBI responsibilities, that includes counterintelligence, it includes counterterrorism, it includes teams looking for and seeking to destroy weapons of mass destruction. You have high level deterrence, you’ve got all kinds of things. We depend upon the FBI doing its job, but there is also an internal police function to the FBI that was controversial at the first, and we need to understand, it’s controversial right now, right down to the headlines about President Trump’s intention related to the FBI. And by the way, all of this is political. And you can say, “Well, that’s bad. You need to make it non-political.” Well, to some degree you do. That’s why you professionalize the kind of criminal investigation service, which is the FBI. But the fact is you can’t take politics out of it. And it is very dangerous to argue that you can. Not when you have the FBI necessarily as a part of the executive branch, and the chief executive otherwise known as the President of the United States, is a politician elected by the people.

I’ll tell you that as a boy, I learned, I just picked up from the larger culture to revere the FBI and to consider its agents heroes. And I can only say it would be good for our country if little boys today could have the same confidence. We need to do whatever it takes to restore that confidence and to restore it genuinely. So we’ll be watching that story closely.

Part V

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Taxing Cow Burps and Flatulence? Climate Revolutionaries are Coming for Denmark’s Livestock (And Yours)

And I did promise you cow flatulence. And so we’re going to go there. And in order to go there, we have to go to Denmark where that nation is considering an unprecedented tax upon burps and flatulence from livestock. They intend to tax it. Now, all this is of course, a part of the war on climate change and of carbon release in the atmosphere. Now, when it comes to Denmark, you’re talking about a country in which about four-fifths is devoted to agriculture, and a lot of that agriculture is animals, and those animals eat an awful lot of biomass, and that biomass is going to go somewhere. And it turns out even more so than with human beings, a part of that biomass is going to go into burps and into flatulence. So both ends of the process are likely to be involved. 

Somini Sengupta of the New York Times reports from Copenhagen, “Denmark known for its inventive restaurants and elegant design studios is about to become known for something more basic, the world’s first belch and manure tax.” “That’s because there are five times as many pigs and cows in Denmark as there are people. Nearly two-thirds of its land is taken up by farming, and agriculture is becoming its largest share of climate pollution, putting lawmakers under intense public pressure to reduce it.” So how are they going to do that? The article tells us, “Denmark’s unlikely coalition government made up of three parties from across the political spectrum has agreed to tax the planet heating methane emissions that all those animals expel through there,” I’m just going to have to clean up the language here. I’ll just say their manure, their flatulence, and their burps.

The New York Times actually uses more colorful language. According to media reports, the Danish Parliament’s consideration would make it the only country in the world to levy such a tax on livestock and what comes out of them. Now, first of all, is this a legitimate problem? Well, it certainly is a legitimate problem in that when you look at sources of emissions of this kind of gas, an awful lot of it does get back to livestock. But you know what? The Danish livestock exists for a very good reason, and that is people like to eat them. And that includes many people in the United States of America who eat Danish ham and other exported meats. And the fact is that it’s going to be very, very difficult indeed, I would argue, nearly impossible to change that human behavior. And so what do you do if you’re a government? If you can’t stop it, then you tax it.

Now, this article in the New York Times is intended as a message to the United States of America because of course, we are also through our own livestock, a massive emitter of such things. And even though most of you get through the day without thinking about a cow or a pig doing those things, the reality is they’re doing those things in order that you can have ham and hamburger, not to mention, by the way, milk. All of that comes together and you’re looking at a massive industry. You’re also looking at something that’s brought about massive human good. The fact that you can eat ham from Denmark, the fact that you can have beef transported all over the world, that is a massive, massively good thing that is frankly unprecedented in human history. It’s not going to come without a cost. It’s not going to come without benefits. A sane society tries to come up with some way to achieve some kind of balance.

And I’ll just go out on a limb and say, I don’t think that the way to achieve that balance is likely to come down to taxing the burps and the flatulence from livestock. But I want to tell you right now who is absolutely unconcerned about all of this and not about to change his or her habits, and that is a cow or a pig. They are to the glory of God, going to continue doing what cows and pigs do.