Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
The environmental populists?
Politics, as they say, makes for strange bedfellows. But how strange, nonetheless still surprises.
Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, who rose to that position by pitching to the populist far right, which dominates the politics of the GOP right now, and which appears to be on the verge of bringing the party down nationally, has tacked in the wind in a very surprising direction. He appeared this past week at a meeting in Natrona County to oppose a proposed gravel pit project at the foot of Casper Mountain. He actually pitched for the upset residents in the area to mobilize and take their fight to Cheyenne, stating:
We have a very delicate ecosystem, the fragility up there, the fragility of the flows … the proximity to domestic water uses. All of those things should have led to a distinct treatment by the Office of State Lands, and that did not happen.
I am, frankly, stunned.
I frankly never really expected Mr. Gray to darken visage of the Pole Stripper monument on the east side of Casper's gateway, which you pass by on the road in from Cheyenne again, as he's not from here and doesn't really have a very strong connection to the state, although in fairness that connection would have been to Casper, where he was employed by his father's radio station and where he apparently spent the summers growing up (in an unhappy state of mind, according to one interview of somebody who knew him then). Gray pretty obviously always had a political career in mind and campaigned from the hard populist right from day one, attempting at first to displace a conservative house member unsuccessfully.
We have a post coming up which deals with the nature of populism, and how it in fact isn't conservatism. Gray was part of the populist rise in the GOP, even though his background would more naturally have put him in the conservative camp, not the populist one. But opportunity was found with populists, who now control the GOP state organization. The hallmark of populism, as we'll explore elsewhere, is a belief in the "wisdom of the people", which is its major failing, and why it tends to be heavily anti-scientific and very strongly vested in occupations that people are used to, but which are undergoing massive stress. In Wyoming that's expressed itself with a diehard attitude that nothing is going on with the climate and that fossil fuels will be, must have, and are going to dominate the state's economy forever. The months leading up to the recent legislative session, and the legislative session itself, demonstrated this with Governor Gordon taking criticism for supporting anything to address carbon concerns. Put fairly bluntly, because a large percentage of Wyoming's rank and file workers depend on the oil and gas industry, and things related to it, any questioning on anything tends to be taken as an attack on "the people".
Natrona County has had a gravel supply problem for quite a while and what the potential miner seeks to do here is basically, through the way our economy works, address it. There would be every reason to suspect that all of the state's politicians who ran to the far right would support this, and strongly. But they aren't.
The fact that Gray is not, and is citing environmental concerns, comes as a huge surprise. But as noted, given his background, he's probably considerably more conservative than populist, but has acted as politicians do, and taken aid and comfort where it was offered. Tara Nethercott ran as a conservative and lost for the same office.
But here's the thing.
That gravel is exactly the sort of thing that populists, if they're true to what they maintain they stand for, ought to support. It's good for industry, and the only reason to oppose the mining is that 1) it's in a bad place in terms of the neighbors and 2) legitimate environmental concerns, if there are any. But that's exactly the point. You really can't demand that the old ways carry on, until they're in your backyard.
Truth be known, given their nature, a lot of big environmental concerns are in everyone's backyard right now.
The old GOP would have recognized that nationally, and wouldn't be spending all sorts of time back in DC complaining about electric vehicles. And if people are comfortable with things being destructive elsewhere, they ought to be comfortable with them being destructive right here. If we aren't, we ought to be pretty careful about it everywhere.
There actually is some precedent for this, FWIW. A hallmark of Appalachian populism was the lamenting of what had happened to their region due to coal mining. John Prine's "Paradise" in some ways could be an environmental populist anthem.
Hard to feel sorry.
Far right goofball Candace Owens was fired from the Daily Wire. She stated that she "cannot be silenced", but frankly the gadfly has gone from sort of being a token black populist to a has been already.
That no doubt sounds extremely harsh, but frankly it's true. Owens went from being sort of a snarky populist commenter to writing some real wack job stuff, at which time her popularity dropped off. Part of her popularity was because she was black, and we don't think of populists being African American, although some are. Once again, black conservatives and black populists are not the same thing. Her status as a rare black populist, and a highly attractive woman at that, didn't hurt in her getting attention.
I don't know what her fan base is, but this is all a sort of tragedy. Always abrasive and controversial, her early commentary was not completely without merit. She's really dropped off in the recent year or years and probably won't really revive. She's sort of like Tucker Carlson that way, being a person of obvious high intelligence who really went down a rabbit hole. Carlson looked like a complete fool with his recent trip to Russia. We hope that Owens has a legitimate conservative revival, or at least isn't touring North Korea to get a one up on Carlson.
The Dead Elephants.
There was an Irish street gang in New York at one time that bore the name The Dead Rabbits. The House GOP is rapidly becoming The Dead Elephants.
Something is really going on.
Filled with disgust, some Republicans in the House are abandoning the House well before their terms are up. In doing that, they're setting themselves free from something. That something might just be failure, but at this rate, it suggests something else. They almost seem set on sabotaging their party, except their party isn't a party.
In 1944 when it became obvious to those who cared to see, and many simply did not, that Germany was going down in defeat, not only did conservative German army officers but a few, albeit very few, members of the SS began to plot against him. It's notable that the cover the July 20 bombing was given was that it was an attempted assassination by the SS. At least one member of the SS was actually part of the plot, and the head of the Berlin police was far from a liberal democrat. Right at the end of the war Himmler was conspiring against Hitler and notably didn't take a place among the suicides at the bunker.
The point is that when people who have been part of a movement begin bailing out, they sense defeat and don't want to be associated with it.
An added point is that with Donald Trump the effective Speaker of the House, and Marjorie Taylor Green acting as the Howler Monkey Sergeant at Arms, Trump's destructiveness has reached a new level. Republicans lost the Oval Office in 2020 and the Senate in 2022. Their House representation declined to perilous levels in the same time period. They were supposed to do well throughout it. Now, not only is Trump causing the GOP to lose at the ballot box, he's causing Republicans to abandon their posts.
In only one more Republicans leaves, the House will be deadlocked and Mike Johnson out the door. If two leave, the Democrats are in control. There will be replacements, but there's no guarantee that they'll be Republicans.
The Conservatives v. The Populists
While, once again, we'll have more on this later, we'll note here that the primary race in the state this year is really shaping up to be a fight between two parties, the Conservatives and the Populists, all of whom register as Republicans.
Some Conservatives have registered to try to displace Populists, and some Populists are doing the same in regard to Conservatives. Of note, the importation of out of state Populists is becoming really obvious, that having been a barely noticed aspect of it until very recently.
Populists are going to be howling that their Republican contenders are "RINO"s in short order, when in fact it's really the other way around, and the Populists are a sort of Neo Dixiecrat. Republicans are late in rising to their challenge, but they are doing it.
The primary may be quite interesting.
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