
Lt. Michael Byrd of the Capitol Police is a conservative hero, but in the strictly small-c sense. People who identify with the Conservative movement in America tend to hate him, because his action did more than anyone else to stop an insurrection which would have installed Conservative politicians in a coup. What Byrd did, though, was act to conserve the institutions he was sworn to protect. If you truly believe in conservatism with all the respect for authority and adherence to societal norms that entails, you should laud Byrd as an everyday champion.
Is Lt. Byrd a conservative hero? He shot an unarmed woman that posed no threat to anyone in her immediate vicinity, including armed Capitol Police officers that were directly behind her not in another corridor as was Lt. Byrd. Nor did he ‘do the most’ to prevent an ‘insurrection’. Only last week, the FBI conceded there was no evidence of an organized attempt to mount a coup at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
What he did contribute to, unwittingly though successfully, was an end to any Congressional oversight of the administration of the 2020 US election, that might have allayed some of the suspicions that the election was not conducting according to law. Given the extent of the changes to election law largely brought about by executive orders and administrative discretion in many of the States, which is contrary to Article 1, Section 4 of the US Constitution, on the grounds of COVID, Congressional oversight was entirely justified.
Consequently, this pearl-clutching about ‘conserving institutions’, ‘respecting authority’ or ‘societal norms’ is rather disingenuous; like a thief demanding that you knock on the door before disturbing his rummaging in your garage.
What we learned in the lead up to the 2020 US election and its aftermath, is that ‘the Cathedral’, is concerned only with conserving its own institutional power. That it will do so by whatever means necessary, societal norms be damned, and that whoever fails to respect its authority, can and will be killed, imprisoned or surveilled with impunity if it deems it necessary for the furtherance of its own ends. And they will call those conducting the ‘policing’: ‘heros’.
Leave a Reply