I feel if people cannot stomach the idea of regional law enforcement and local officials continuing the Cornbread Mafia, at the very least, years of ongoing calamity warrants nonpartisan investigation and terminations, not gentle early retirements and hero status. But then, the framework manifesting these issues would still be in place, prospects wide open for brand new inbred redneck jocks stepping in to fill the void.
Nationally, Trump as well isn’t acting in a vacuum, nor did he slither his blubberous ego out of one. Any critique of that ongoing disaster in human form has to be extended to home-brewed capitalism itself. That is what made him possible, what made all of these issues possible. Not Russians, the Illuminati or stupid luck. The western Neocon billionaire Robert Mercer and western Neolib billionaire Mark Zuckerberg found common, lucrative ground with Cambridge Analytica at the expense of millions of conservatives and liberals alike, distorting online user experiences of millions for profit, with the Electoral College proving in broad daylight half the population are too stupid to see domestic money buys all elections. Partisanship was always illusion. Like Pelosi said, at the end of the day they’re all just capitalists, the definitive form of the self-righteous. When everyone is waiting to get the riches they faithfully believe they deserve, it will take WW3 before greed might be regulated. This rushed thread by a writer for The Root samples how the American dream was never anything but supremacists fellating themselves, their lack of spines always succeeding where their tiny pricks made it physically impossible. Yet his insistence on denigrating all white people has him depending on the same supremacist logic. It’s still scapegoating, hoping for a transference of capitalism’s perceived rewards rather than its abolition altogether. Transferal of victim status means victims would still be manufactured, wholesale.
American patriots, god-fearing and flag-waving and generally loaded on pills, have that in common with capitalists, the blunt fact of their being ignorant or sadists or both. Far more often do their big heads have open space enough for both hats.
Why does the public not view depriving and withholding billions from the economy as an attempt to sabotage the economy? If someone hides as much food or medicine, torches and pitchforks would end them. Seriously, stockpiling wealth deprives markets. How is that not taken as traitorous to national interests by persons believing nationalism means anything whatsoever? Because when industry is perceived as the backbone of the country, coddling it is the fancy calligraphy of an invitation to grow crooked. Money fetishists are fucking nuts, readily excusing the inexcusable in hopes that their own excuses may get bought, may be rewarded. As Catholic historian John Dalberg-Acton wrote in 1887,
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men…“
The only real money and resources in Nelson County are in the hands of property-owners and authorities, and producers of the Bardstown podcast are sycophants and simpletons for being unwilling to consider how the few persons with means to avoid arrest avoid arrest by said means. Wealth never undergoes piss-testing, and while nobody actually needs a badge in order to help others, it certainly helps bullies to get away with being utter dicks. The local police assured the podcast’s “investigative” team that the local police are heroes, and despite the years of continuous failures in serving the public trust and utter lack of results that was all the evidence their ratings needed, leaving listeners with absolutely nothing but graves filled with thoughts and prayers and paid advertisements.
The retired Bardstown police chief Rick McCubbin loves to take credit for his “blue family” splitting up the Cornbread Mafia of old, but in reality they allowed the various activities to grow from their neighborhoods across ten different states, prompting federal investigators to say enough was enough and do the heavy lifting. At the same time the FBI was organizing drug raids in the region, it was also conducting Operation Boptrot, a wide-scale crackdown on bribery among state officials where approximately 10% of Kentucky’s legislature, both house and senate, Democrat and Republican, were implicated, some taking bribes for as little as $100. Alongside the rampantly increased militarization nationwide, law enforcement at every level today seems more concerned with making criminality manifest, while burgling the public themselves. So that it would appear the bribery crackdowns and drug raids alike were purposed ultimately with the most obscene form of venture capitalism; the sweeping transfer of power into its own long-armed clutches.
I think it was belittling for Jessica Noll in the final installment of her pod to completely disregard fears of bourbon festival attendees to speak on record. In the same sense, what if law enforcement refuse to divulge files because there are no investigations in progress? As with every prior effort by outsider commercial media in covering the ongoing crimes in Bardstown, special interest is noticeably rewarded to fifth amendment rights of local police at the expense of everyone else. But even at face value, their lack of results damns them. I would think based on comments made by Brooks Houck in his interrogation, checking phone records for him and Crystal Rogers both of that particular night would make or break the case definitively, yet still a holding pattern years after the fact. If there are avenues this or any broadcast refuse to consider, then justice is not the priority. And if that’s tinfoil, so be it because all that listeners have been offered are stale leftovers anyway. Real investigators would push to drug-test Judge Dean Watts and Bardstown’s city council members of the last decade, push for audits of the checking/savings accounts of local officers of recent years from both the Bardstown police department and Nelson County sheriff’s office and question alibis for one and all for the times of the unsolved murders. All possible other stones have been upturned. Real investigators should not take at face value anything stated by persons with absolutely nothing to show for their efforts but growing body counts, and excuses galore. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
In a just society, Rick McCubbin alone should have a thousand kicks to the groin coming, one from every member of the community harassed, robbed, groped or worse by officers he himself proudly oversaw. Also in a just society, KY Standard editor Forrest Berkshire would be the assistant manager of McDonalds. Instead, their avoidance of truth is humored by a powerless community. Both syntax and context are lessened when regarded as specific to credentials. Privilege and entitlement to convey truths is means to omit truths.
And so must we conclude that power is the opposite of truth.