One of the chief delights in life is being able to tell people who mocked you for your beliefs, I told you so…I had the recent opportunity to do this after I recalled an exchange I had with a member of the Obama and Biden administrations in 2022. John MacWilliams was speaking to a club I belonged to on, “Cyber Threats to Critical Infrastructure.”
He had an impressive background with degrees from Stanford (B.A. in International Relations), MIT (B.S. in Political Science) and Harvard Law (J.D.). MacWilliams had held an equally dazzling array of jobs in the government, including Special Assistant to the President, Senior Advisor to the Homeland Security Advisor (what a master work in bureaucratese, i.e. The Advisor To The Advisor), and Associate Deputy Secretary at the Department of Energy. Now (of course!) he is in academe and teaches a course at Columbia on Energy and National Security.
Like most political animals, MacWilliams made himself the hero of his story, with a cameo role for President Biden.
He focused largely on two events from the early days of the Biden Administration in his remarks.
The first was the calamitous winter storm that struck Texas and other parts of the Southwest in 2021. As readers may recall, a big part of the problem was the loss of power from wind turbines freezing up due to record low temperatures, leaving millions without heat.
MacWilliams started with a verbal ju-jitsu, claiming that the arctic blast was further evidence of climate change, formerly known as global warming. In this regard he reminds me of a limousine liberal/trustafarian I knew in college. A few years back he was flogging blue green algae (“from a volcanic lake in New Mexico”) as an all purpose health and wellness supplement. He sent out a recorded promotional message with the following deathless words; “After you take my special formula, you may feel better, you may feel worse, or you may feel exactly the same. All this means, it is working! Keep taking it and order more so you’ll never run out.”
In MacWilliam’s case he’s saying, “The weather may get hotter, it may get colder, it may remain the same! All prove that climate change is real and that we need to spend $10 trillion on the Green New Deal.” Never mind it was the alternative energy source, wind turbines, that failed most dramatically in the crisis and caused untold suffering. (Don’t confuse me with the facts! Net zero carbon emissions by 2030 or bust!)
To add insult to the injury, the speaker ridiculed the Republican governors in the region as hypocrites because they’d asked for emergency assistance from the federal government in dealing with this crisis. (“You would think they were Democrats the way they were begging for help!”)
I guess that Democratic governors Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California were also hypocrites because they had enlisted the help of the Trump administration to handle the COVID pandemic.
Oh, I forgot, that is a “what about?” argument, one you cannot make to point out Democratic double standards. In other words, that was then and this is now!
MacWilliams then interrupted his snark fest for an additional paid political announcement.
He announced that not only did he play a critical role in coordinating the Administration’s response to the blizzard but the crisis had given him a chance to work directly, one on one, with President Biden. He said we needed to understand how Biden was at the top of his game. He was, MacWilliams claimed, incredibly sharp and had an amazing grasp of technical issues.
He then turned to his own even more pivotal role (according to him) in the Colonial Pipeline matter.
This was a 2021 ransom ware attack on the principal oil pipeline serving the east coast of the U.S. The hackers, known only as ‘Darkside’, got inside the company computer system in a way they could shut down all the flow of petroleum unless a $4,400,000 ransom was paid.
MacWilliams described getting a call while out to dinner with his wife, calling him into the White House to deal with the crisis. He spoke movingly of what it was like to work without sleep for two weeks, sustained only by the certainty that the well-being of millions turned on his efforts prevailing. He stressed that his ability to persevere was also bolstered by the opportunity to report directly to President Biden, who was amazing, MacWilliams said, in his insight and ability to cut to the heart of the matter.
I’m not sure I’d want to hold up the Colonial Pipeline affair as anything to brag about.
Since the government was not able to counter the malware, the company felt it had no choice but to pay the $4,400,000 in extortion money.
The perpetrators got away, although most of the ransom money was eventually recovered, albeit worth not nearly as much as when it was paid due to the decline in crypto currency’s value in the interim. The extortion worked; i.e. the pipeline was shut down, the ransom was paid, and the perpetrators escaped. Some success!
MacWilliams, with an immense sense of self-satisfaction, then opened the floor to questions about other aspects of the Biden Administration’s policies. After a few questions which were meant to show off the questioner’s knowledge ( “Won’t this be impacted by quantum computing?”), I was given the chance to ask him about the Administration’s decision to revive the Iran nuclear accords.
Sizing me up as a Republican plant, he blustered that all enlightened opinion (i.e. the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy Establishment)was four square behind restarting the agreement.
Recognizing the classic argument from authority (All the best people agree with me!), I decided to short circuit the discussion. Assuming for the sake of argument that the deal was a good thing, I asked him why the Biden Administration asked the Russian Government to be the honest broker between the U.S. and the Iranians.
Specifically, if Putin is a war criminal, if the Russian state has committed crimes against humanity by its invasion of the Ukraine, and there is a need for regime charge in Russia, why do we think the Russians will act in good faith in helping us in negotiations with Tehran?
Haven’t they already created an impasse by insisting that sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine be lifted as part of a U.S.-Iran Accord?
Mr. Harvard, Mr. Stanford, Mr. M.I.T had no answer to this brain teaser from a graduate of the University of Kansas.
Finally, he stammered that we needed to get other nuclear powers involved. I replied, Why not get the Pakistanis and the North Koreans in the mix?
He was dumbstruck by this.
By this time a crowd of onlookers had gathered around us, many of whom kept trying to interrupt me or shut me up. So I decided to finish him off, I was so angry at the hostility shown by his newfound fans.
I segued into my best Biden imitation. “Come on, man! You know, Corn Pop was a bad dude . . . .”
He stammered; “You’re getting very aggressive! This was supposed to be a social setting.”
I told him that it started that way but that he had lowered it to the level of a Democratic infomercial.
Now the crowd surrounding us was getting angry that their newfound icon was getting the worst of it from some old guy with an Olathe accent, so I turned on my heels and left.
It is always satisfying to win an argument but the whole experience was also a teachable moment.
In hindsight, it revealed itself as proof positive of a deliberate campaign by Democratic partisans like MacWilliams to keep someone unable to function as president in the Oval Office.
Either he had the interactions he claimed with Biden, but lied about what he saw, or he didn’t have those interactions but nonetheless went out and told a knowing falsehood at the direct order of the Democratic Party’s political commissars.
Do you think we will ever get an apology from the people who put the nuclear football in the hands of someone who should be in an Alzheimers unit? Of course not!
The reason why is best illustrated by liberal “ethicist” Sam Harris (“Letter to a Christian Nation”).
He was asked about the justification for deliberately lying about the Hunter Biden laptop, falsely claiming it was Russian disinformation; His response, “Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared.” (Twitter post, 8-18-22).
”No more than its European counter parts does America’s Progressive ruling class offer any vision of truth, goodness, or advantage to attract the rest of society to itself. Like its European kin, all that American Progressivism offers is obedience to the ruling class, enforced by political correctness. “Angelo Codevilla,Claremont Review of Books, Fall, 2016.
Funny how the voters all forgot how Biden publicly supported the Iraq war before, during, and after the invasion. Now Joe says he was “misspoken”. Joe is a liar, been a liar and will always be a liar.
Joe Biden is all the proof needed to show why term limits in Congress is needed.
MacWilliams, your typical Democrat.
Excellent writing.
Thank you!