Anyplace, Anytime Cowboy

“You want to run your mouth?” Senator Markwayne Mullin (Republican, Oklahoma) spits, barely audible over his mic. Last week brought some low drama during a Senate hearing of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee. We’re confident you saw the clip after it was snagged from C-SPAN2. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ November 29, 2023 |  [View Online]( |  [Sign Up]( Anyplace, Anytime Cowboy “Talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much.” — John Wayne , “You want to run your mouth?” Senator Markwayne Mullin (Republican, Oklahoma) spits, barely audible over his mic. Last week brought some low drama during a Senate hearing of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee. We’re confident you saw the clip after it was snagged from C-SPAN2. “We can be two consenting adults,” Mullin continued in disgust. “We can finish it here.” We remember fights in the graveyard across from our Junior High School in Exeter, New Hampshire that started in a similarly juvenile way. CONTINUED BELOW... POWERED BY GOLD & SILVER SUMMIT How safe is your retirement account now? The US government — with the approval of President Biden — could soon do the unthinkable. By issuing a programmable new form of money called…Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). If you want to protect yourself against this potential assault on your financials…You'll want to attend the upcoming [Gold & Silver Summit this Tuesday @ 4pm PT / 7pm ET.]( You have a small window of opportunity to safeguard your retirement. [Click here to register for free.]( CONTINUED... “OK, that’s fine, perfect!” Sean O’Brien, President of the Teamsters, explodes. “I’d love to do it right now!” “Stand your butt up then,” Mullin shoots back. “You stand your butt up—” Mullin leaps forward out his chair and begins to lean over the banister toward O’Brien. The mic screeches then muffles. Here’s the best part. Bernie Sanders, the octogenarian hometown hero from Vermont, breaks them up. “Sit down!” Old man Sanders booms, holding Mullins back. “You’re a United States senator! This is a hearing! And God knows the American people have enough contempt for Congress, let’s not make it worse.” Heh. Bernie Sanders. It’s not very often we get to agree with him. But he got the “contempt for Congress” part right. Senator Mullin is a former MMA fighter. He’s also a plumber by trade. His real beef with O’Brien is over union efforts to infiltrate the plumbing business. And the muckraking O’Brien totes from behind the safety of his computer screen. “You know where to find me. Anyplace, Anytime cowboy,” O’Brien posted on X (formerly Twitter) after the hearing. Mullin suggested later in an interview that a return to physical violence could help cure what he derided as a culture of “keyboard warriors” who “go out there and run their mouth all the time, and then they don’t ever have to face the consequences.” We’ve been staying up late recently pondering the roots of American order. Namely the principles and customs that uphold a certain standard of civility in our country, or something like that. Mullin’s challenge to O’Brien is a silly detail in a much larger theme we see very clearly coming to a head next year during the election. There is a thread of thinkers influencing public opinion in the United States that dates back to Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s and the sociologist duo Cloward and Piven in the 1960s. We’ve written about both here in past missives. In effect, their collective idea is that to affect political change, the institutions that support our republic have to be revolutionized from within. In Gramsci’s case he advocated taking over the commanding heights of higher education, so by the time a socialist revolution was nigh, the educated class would already have a belief system that supports it. Cloward and Piven, for their part, wanted to overwhelm the government bureaucracy by increasing demands on what the government promises and claims to be able to deliver. An overwhelmed system would become dysfunctional and bankrupt, ripe for chaos and a new order designed on their principles. We’ll have more to say about Gramsci, Cloward and Piven as the election year unfolds. But for our purposes today we note that O’Brien, and Sanders for that matter, fall within the intellectual spectrum occupied by these academics. And for now, we might just raise our fists like Mullin. Illustration of Judge David S. Terry stabbing S.A. Hopkins of the Vigilance Committee in 1856. (Source: The New Republic) Congress has seen no shortage of epic political brawls. The old method of fisticuffs and pistol-whipping—popularized by Andrew Jackson and his penchant for dueling—has been replaced by threats over Twitter. “We were there to be talking about, and did talk about, the crisis facing working families in this country, the growing gap between the very rich and everybody else and the role that unions are playing in improving the standard of living of the American people,” Sanders said. “We’re not there to talk about cage fighting.” This is not to point fingers and say, oh look at Mullin who is a Republican and is overstepping his bounds as a public figure and as a citizen. Rather, the conflict and infighting is all-prevalent and mounting. We fear the likelihood of social chaos in the future, especially as we move closer and closer to [the fated 2024 election]( CONTINUED BELOW... POWERED BY WEISS RATINGS Forecaster with 99.8% Accuracy Makes Shocking Prediction Starting as soon as a few months from now, the United States government will make a sweeping change to bank accounts nationwide. It will give them unprecedented powers to control your bank account. Unless you protect yourself today. Fortunately, there are 3 simple steps you can take to safeguard your savings. [Discover these 3 simple steps here.]( CONTINUED... Violence has always been a part of the government process; the very fabric of our country is built on curbing the appetites of land-owning curmudgeons who will, if given a reason, bear arms to defend their rights. Sometimes chaos really boils over… sometimes that is by design... 2024 is going to be one of those years when organized protests clash with economic anxiety to give us unforeseen, but predictable, political violence. Think: the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the 1960s and protests in the streets like during the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. We might return to one of the original founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, to gauge the gravity of the situations that are arising more and more frequently: My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Needless to say, historically It’s confusing, its messy. La plus ca change. And remember, Jefferson wore satin, frills, and heels. The strength of a democracy lies in its ability to accommodate diverse opinions and find peaceful solutions to conflicts. However, it's important to distinguish between healthy political discourse and physical or aggressive confrontation. Follow your own bliss, Addison Wiggin The Wiggin Sessions P.S. Billionaire Charles Koch’s network AFP Action is backing former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. A memo from AFP Action said Haley offers “the opportunity to turn the page on the current political era.” The AFP Action endorsement reveals how pro-business Republicans plan to articulate a rejection of the Grand Old Party’s recent shift to embrace Christian nationalism. The Koch network stayed out of the presidential races in 2016 and 2020. Haley’s policies are close enough to AFP Action’s free-market ideology that it wants to take a stand against the MAGA movement. And even if Haley doesn’t win the nomination, pundits predict, weakening Trump so he is defeated in the general election would get rid of the MAGA base and enable libertarian-leaning business leaders to regain control of the Republican Party. Could we claim that this chaos and infighting is actually a healthy democracy at work? We want to know what you think. You can write in with your comments by clicking [here](mailto:feedback@wigginsessions.com). POWERED BY DEMISE OF THE DOLLAR The Daily Missive from The Wiggin Sessions is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We do not rent or share your email address. By submitting your email address, you consent to The Wiggn Sessions delivering daily email issues and advertisements. 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