Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is in many ways the consummate example of a certain breed of politician- just not in a good way. Possessed in equal measures of all the qualities of a dedicated ideologue and shape-shifting grifter who will do and say whatever is necessary to advance the progressive agenda as well as her own power base. Throw in a sulfuric scent which comes from the combustive mix of her politics and the cultural Catholicism she adheres to, and you have what is often seen as the quintessential denizen of a place Paul Scofield’s character in the 1994 film Quiz Show referred to as a “swamp that traded malaria for politics.”
To be fair, Pelosi has not always been such a polarizing figure. However, ever since Donald Trump defied the odds and the power of the Swamp in 2016, her temperament and demeanor have, like the aged Wolverine after he took the MGH serum in Logan, intensified with a vengeance. As such, the last four years have seen her doubling down on the unabashed hypocrisy, the position-flipping, and the selected pandering that she has engaged in over her long career. Yet even now it seems that those personality traits are still too pedestrian for the current fight-geist, and she has moved onto outright gaslighting her detractors. Of course, her actions have not gone unchallenged by those who see Pelosi as emblematic of all that is wrong with the D.C. swamp creatures.
What Comes Around, Goes Around
In January of last year, self-styled investigative journalists Laura Loomer and Nick Monroe, as well as some illegal immigrants from south of the border, set up a tent on Pelosi’s Napa Valley estate in order to protest her stance on illegal immigration and the funding of the border wall. When police arrived to remove the assembled from the property, Loomer live streamed herself using Pelosi’s own vapid talking points about how keeping immigrants out was “immoral” or how asking for ID’s was “racist” in order to highlight the hollowness of Pelosi’s professed stance on immigration.
Later that summer, the city of San Francisco gained national notoriety for its publicly funded “poop patrols” and “brownouts” on its website’s map which showed the locations of all the trash and human waste left in the streets by the thousands of homeless people who flocked to the city. A local YouTuber named “Mando” was incensed at how his hometown, a city notorious for its high taxes and exclusionary real estate enclaves, had turned into a literal s***hole. Wanting to send a message to Pelosi (who represented his district), he gave a whole new meaning to the term “s*** posting” and live streamed himself defecating on the Madame Speaker’s driveway of her San Francisco home. Later, as he expected, he was detained by police, and once again highlighted Pelosi’s two-faced governing style when Mando was ticketed for doing something that was happening all over the city, while city hall did little to alleviate the issue.
However, these two stunts were mere pranks compared to what happened recently when Pelosi’s home was again vandalized. Aside from words such as “$2k cancel rent!” and “we want everything” being spray-painted on her garage door, whoever committed the act left a severed pig’s head in a small pool of blood on her driveway. It is still not known who is responsible for the act but it’s obvious that it was done in protest of Pelosi’s intransigence in voting for a Covid-relief bill. For months, she purposely dickered over the relief package until Biden won the election. Then, and only then, did she settle for a smaller piece of pie for the American people, but a gargantuan pork-filled omnibus spending bill for a lot business, institutions, and programs that we could’ve gone without for the time being.
It is uncertain if Pelosi even knew about the first two protests, but whether out of indifference or condescension, Pelosi and similarly-minded elected officials have been rather blasé about the event. This is unfortunate. For in the same way that flies are drawn to what apparently has now becomes the new “San Francisco treat”, politicians like Pelosi have a way of attracting these kinds of controversies whose significance they completely misread. This in turn only fuels the disconnect between them and the people they govern to the point where, as was tragically seen in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, boils over into an uncontrollable rage.
The Roots of the Rage
As the current presidential administration comes to a close, it is clear that all of the issues that bedraggled our nation in 2020 and the last four years, are not going to magically disappear just because we are beginning another administration. Issues such as investigating incidents of voter fraud or the ongoing effects of pandemic weariness. Issues like the deliberate and arbitrary crippling of our economy and the months of rioting, looting, and burning, all of which was egged on by the Left’s pathological need to turn every conversation or policy debate into a gaslighting session about race, class, and gender. Even if all of those issues were to dissipate down the memory hole, there would still exist an insurmountable rift in our nation that has been with us for more than a generation.
It is a rift between two different visions of America. One vision saw Trump’s presidency as an attempt to push back against institutional and cultural elites, the Sili-Commie Valley tech bros, and basically everyone else who is part of what reporter Micheal Tracey recently called the “new corporate authoritarian liberal-left mono-culture” that seeks to impose its woke will on all Americans. It is a vision which tended to see the Constitution and an enduring American character that balanced Nationalism and Federalism, as the best way to find specific solutions to specific problems.
On the other side of the rift are those who detested Trump and who see the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as heralding in some kind of year zero for our nation. They have a vision of America where virtually every traditional social, religious, political, and cultural institution that used to give Americans a shared sense of identity, needs to be scorned, “canceled”, and remade. In its place they offer an ersatz unifying (but conformist) vision that has, in true Caesarean fashion, virtually deified the Swamp (even going as far as calling the Capitol “sacred ground” by someone who should know better) so as to make growing the power and reach of the Swamp more palatable to the masses.
Enter Nancy Pelosi, who is the prime example of the kind of Swamp politician who, knowingly or not, does everything in her power to deliberately pry the rift further and further apart. These “Nancy’s” are akin to absentee landlords who are far removed from the problems and suffering, and in Pelosi’s case the filth, of those they are supposed to represent. They condescendingly look down on us as unruly children to whom freedom and liberty are privileges they feel entitled to dole out in proportion to the deference we give them and the size of the rent (i.e. taxes and campaign contributions) we pay. All the while lording over us a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude that they seek to impose on everyone, and then gaslight us if we point out the inconsistency.
All of this is of course done without one shred of accountability for the damage they do when their policies predictably fail, and yet they keep getting voted in time and time again. Of course on the taxpayer’s dime, and not just the proceeds of current taxation system but given the unprecedented amount of money spent on dealing with the current viral unpleasantness, they are also tapping into the future wages of our children to the seventh generation.
When it All Goes to Crap
When it comes to all of the protests against the Swamp, Nancy Pelosi seems to be its one proxy that draws the most flies. And while the aforementioned stunt by Mando was certainly puerile and execrable, there is an aspect of it that is, metaphorically speaking, a fitting image for ongoing battle of wills between the two visions for our nation.
After chastising the Pharisees for esteeming the traditions of men higher than God’s commandments, our Lord said told his disciples that,“whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and is evacuated. But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man.”
Thus it would seem what one online wag called Mando’s “s*** heard round the world”, was far less egregious than the ideological excreta that emanates out of the hearts of Pelosi and the rest of the Swamp things. There isn’t a sin our Lord spoke of above, that has not been cynically used or defended by themselves to forward the power and policies of the swamp. Moreover, the image is fitting because when it comes to someone who has been in politics as long as Pelosi has, her words are the waste product of what once was a meaningful and shared American identity before it was consumed by Leftism. The stench and messiness is there for everyone to see, you cannot mistake it for anything else than to say that they are simply talking s*** again.
It would be nice to think that we could find a simpler and more pleasant way to deal with our nation’s current situation, but for the foreseeable future that does not seem to be the case. Whether it was the severed pigs head at Pelosi’s house or the deaths that happened at the Capitol raid, blood has been spilt. We seem to be passed the point where any of our current issues and the rage that lies beneath them can be handled in a way that won’t involve complete capitulation or more blood being spilt. All I can say is prepare yourself accordingly for a long fight, because as I recently wrote, the fight will come to you one way or the other.
Photo Credit- hindustantimes.com