Dan Bongino, doing his best impersonation of a rage-addled fourth-grader — and it is a very convincing impression! — writes:
Setting aside the issue of a man pushing 50 relying on emojis . . .
Bongino has his dress over his head because I pointed out earlier today that while he today insists that “taxation is theft,” he spent almost all of his pre-broadcast career as a government employee, having his wages and benefits paid out of taxes — receiving stolen goods, by his own account. After that, he was a failed political candidate — i.e., someone who tried to keep himself on the taxpayers’ dime.
There are two possibilities here:
One, maybe Bongino doesn’t really believe what he said. He has three hours of radio to fill up with outrage theater every day, and that’s not easy, as I know from having filled in on radio from time to time. Maybe he got carried away, maybe his words didn’t come out right. If that is the case, then he should say so. Happens to all of us.
Two, maybe Bongino does believe that taxation is theft. If that is the case, then the only honorable course of action for him is to return all the money — wages, pension, benefits, etc. — he received as a government employee, because that is tainted money. That assumes that Bongino cares about honor more than he cares about money and celebrity.
I suppose there is a third possibility: that Bongino is a self-serving outrage merchant who simply says the first daft thing that comes into his head every day because he believes, not without some reason, that there is money to be made in that. But, of course, that cannot possibly be true, given the enormous contempt for his audience and for We the People that would imply!