Government worker stereotypes!

People often like to stereotype the workers in bureaucratic government jobs as terminally boring and utterly risk-averse – gray-suited drones in gray buildings churning out long dreary documents and powerpoints.

However, the impeachment process has shown that this stereotype is, in many cases, completely misguided. The heroes who are sacrificing their careers to stop a corrupt presidency hail from organizations like the Internal Revenue Service and the Office of Management and Budget. They’ve decided to directly incur the wrath of the most powerful person in the world in order to right the injustices they are seeing. That is true bravery.

An ocean away, there are people like Wang Yongzhi, a county leader in Xinjiang and career CCP bureaucrat who quietly disobeyed Beijing’s orders around Uighur detention camps to release thousands of detainees he deemed to be low-risk. I also hope the internal Communist party functionary who bravely leaked hundreds of pages of internal CCP documents around Uighur policies to the New York Times covered their tracks really well. They’re probably putting their life at risk.

I remember having a long discussion once with a lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission as I talked to him about what I'd seen at the startup I was at (which was under investigation by the SEC).

I'd called them, the conversation was polite but sober, and while I have some issues with the approach the SEC takes to accounting fraud issues, I have absolutely no doubt that this particular investigator has both his heart in more or less the right place, justice as a goal, and a degree of painstaking patience that is way, way, above my pay grade.
raises a glass

Here's, to you, SEC lawyer guy from 2002.