Belmont Club: The Hall Versus the Strangers

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They say there are only two kinds of stories: ones that begin with a man leaving on a journey and ones that start with a stranger riding into town. But there is a third type: one about a man who goes on a journey and returns four years later with a bunch of formidable-looking strangers.

In that genre, the townsfolk know the significance of these arrivals and understand the meaning of the sudden burst of activity down at the Hall, the heightened vigilance, the preparations for defense. They cast anxious glances at the calendar, reckoning the time ’til Nov. 5, when they expect things to come to a head. Instinctively they gather into groups, the loners staring out of windows, wondering.

They know what’s coming: a challenge to the Hall itself. Everyone understands that the outcome – which they cannot foresee – will affect them all. The Hall has been standing for a long time. A whole generation has grown up in its shadow, never knowing a time without it. Its mighty roots consist of annual budgets and multiyear procurement processes. The budgets are comprised of line items, some of which are so institutionalized they are tap roots unto themselves.

From each root sprouts a procurement process governed by a web of regulations, itself consisting of 53 parts and over 2,000 pages. It’s a vast labyrinth. The Hall is by far “the largest buyer of goods and services in the world,” A whole culture has grown up around its root system. There are even “not-for-profit organizations that sometimes advise agencies, via grants or contracts from them, and often include staff who used to work in an agency or a relevant contractor corporation,” paid to tell the Hall to hire them. This is one of many entryways into a vast concourse of revolving doors between the Hall and its contractors. Once inside the system, one can live there permanently. Take the career of one man as an example:

James Comey left his role as deputy attorney general in the Department of Justice in 2005, serving first as general counsel and then senior vice president of Lockheed Martin and then as general counsel at Bridgewater Associates, both major federal contractors. In September 2013 he returned as director of the FBI and famously handled, or didn’t handle, the issue of Hillary Clinton’s private server holding classified and other government information.

Every aspect of the Hall has a corresponding basis in this root structure. Take gender ideology, for instance. Where did it come from in Washington? Upon taking office in 2021, the Biden administration used the Black Lives Matter unrest as justification to issue a slew of executive orders and memoranda entrenching left-wing ideologies at all levels of the federal government under the omnibus label of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI.

As part of this initiative, the White House required each federal agency to submit detailed DEI progress reports regularly, appoint a chief diversity officer, and create “Agency Equity Teams,” whose leaders were tasked with “delivering equitable outcomes.” These requirements contributed to what the president called “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”

From that moment, the growth of the DEI line items, RFPs, and plaza of revolving doors had begun. A new root system started its inexorable process of elaboration. Soon it would manifest itself above ground in newly created positions and programs. Already existing bureaucracies would nod in recognition to the new program on the block. Foreign bureaucracies would be encouraged to create counterparts in every town.

The people of the town doubted that the newly arrived strangers fully comprehended the power of the Hall and understood its monstrous strength and resilience. Could they know that it could be razed to the ground yet recover the instant they left? Did they suspect that many a man who believed himself the site’s new master would awake at night to find themselves covered with vines sprung overnight from the ground and borne whence they were never seen again? November 5 would be their doom.

But that is the appeal of stories involving men who leave on journeys and return as strangers with mysterious companions. They have been somewhere and perhaps returned with knowledge that the townsfolk and maybe even people in the Hall do not know. Or else why would they have returned?

The hand sweeps ’round the face of the clock. The pages of the calendar fall one by one. The Hall remains unperturbed by the challenge from the edge of town. But the suspense builds as people await the day.