Not to be too especially dire with this column, but it bears pointing out that the basis of any government’s legitimacy is that it has, by whatever means it might manage it, the consent of those over whom it seeks to apply its power.
And it’s a colossal indictment of the Biden regime — at this point it’s difficult to call it an administration, because it doesn’t administer the law so much as it attempts to write new laws outside the bounds of the Constitution from which its power came — that it is challenging its own legitimacy and that consent of the people.
To wit:
1. The FBI is a dead agency walking
George Parry here at The American Spectator yesterday might have written the best of several pieces laying a wreath at the grave of the FBI as an institution Americans have respect for and a willingness to cooperate with. Parry’s column, “An Elegy for the FBI,” is written not from the perspective of some anti-government radical; to the contrary, Parry is a longtime veteran of the justice system who worked closely with FBI agents for decades to put some of the worst villains in American history behind bars.
And he says the game is over following that breathtakingly awful 10-hour invasion and occupation of a former president’s residence:
But, whatever their purpose, did any of the geniuses running the FBI consider the massive, unavoidable, and irremediable damage that its unprecedented search of the former president’s home would do to the agency’s reputation and relationship with the American public? Had they forgotten that 74 million Americans voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election? Were they so intoxicated on the D.C. swamp gas that, with all of their vast investigative powers and access to information, they were oblivious to the intense loyalty and unwavering support that almost all of those 74 million still harbor for Trump? …
But, now that the FBI has been transformed into a partisan political goon squad, what should and will be the reaction of patriotic Americans the next time it seeks their help and cooperation?
If the response is sullen, hostile, and distrustful stony silence, the FBI shouldn’t be surprised. It will have earned all of that and more.
And the safety and security of our nation will suffer accordingly.
Parry’s loss of faith is no outlier. At American Greatness, Kyle Shideler is openly calling for the dissolution and dismemberment of the FBI as a necessary action for the preservation of the republic:
Nevertheless, the FBI must be abolished.
The solution to the abuses we now endure is not just to subject the FBI to another fruitless inspector general investigation but to dismantle it completely. The bureau cannot be the focus of yet another congressional hearing. FBI Director Christopher Wray, like his predecessors, is more than happy to sit smirking while a handful of grandstanding congressmen and senators pound the table and yell on C-SPAN. Then he’ll jet off for a holiday vacation on a taxpayer-funded private jet while the same congressmen vote to increase his budget. Again.
No, the FBI must be rendered into component parts and distributed to the four winds.
These are not outliers. Dozens of such pieces have been written in recent weeks among the conservative commentariat, and the opinion is hardening on the Republican side that the FBI is too corrupted, too politicized, and too dangerous to be allowed to continue.
Yes, but, comes the retort, those are just a bunch of right-wingers sore about what happened to Trump and the other right-wingers who tore up the Capitol on Jan. 6.
If that’s what you think, after two decades of nonstop abuses on the part of the FBI, you are not paying attention.
First it was the Left who was disgusted by the FBI. Then the Obama administration turned it into a modern-day Stasi and started racking up victims like Scooter Libby and Mike Flynn.
And now?
More Americans distrust the FBI and the DOJ than trust them. Americans think it’s a politicized Gestapo for the Biden regime.
The FBI used to be considered the most independent of the federal agencies. J. Edgar Hoover went to extraordinary lengths to enforce that. Now? Its legitimacy is kaput, and lawyers are openly telling their clients to give the FBI no cooperation at all without representation.
It’s just a matter of time before the cancer of politicization of this agency kills the patient. Shideler is right; it would be better to shut the FBI down now and reconstitute its replacement in multiple boxes broken out by various tasks it performs rather than continue this enterprise.
2. States are beginning to push back
Eric Schmitt, the attorney general of the state of Missouri, gave a perfect demonstration of what’s to come as the Biden regime attempts to inflict the FBI on the American people in an effort to tighten the feds’ hands around our throats.
The Bureau demanded Missouri supply it lists of concealed-carry permit holders in the Show Me State, and Schmitt’s defiant response was a classic defense of federalism and individual freedom:
The great Attorney General of Missouri, @Eric_Schmitt, sends a very clear message to the #FBI. pic.twitter.com/ro3wW9544p
— Lenny Dykstra (@LennyDykstra) August 10, 2022
Schmitt is almost assuredly going to be a U.S. senator next year. More importantly, though, he’s not speaking just for himself. There is a coalition of about half, and often more than half, of the attorneys general across the country who routinely challenge the Biden regime’s overreaches in court and usually win. Schmitt’s defiance is just one data point in what will shortly be a pattern.
The states won’t tolerate the Mar-a-Lago raid or the other things. Cooperation will break down, and the FBI will cease to function.
At that point Americans will have a choice to make: preserve local law enforcement or allow the Left to destroy it with “defund the police” idiocy and Soros DAs in the cities and a politicized Justice Department capturing and nationalizing law enforcement along woke socialist lines.
It isn’t hard to see how that’s going to go. Watch your local congressional races and you can see the wind blowing, and not in the FBI’s direction.
3. Ramping up the IRS is a pure sign of bad faith with the American people
The 87,000 IRS agents envisioned in this latest disastrous legislation coming out of Washington have engendered lots of memes with large football stadiums not big enough to hold all the new proposed taxmen.
And the job posting that discussed IRS agents’ willingness to use deadly force to impose the tax laws had to be pulled down among public outrage.
This will be a catastrophic political mistake by the Democrat Party, because there is zero upside in hiring 87,000 tax collectors to harass an American populace living mostly hand to mouth as it is.
But that isn’t the nub of it. The real lesson of the Biden regime’s IRS gambit is the utter hatred of the American people evidenced in the decision to move forward with this.
Governments who hate the people they govern cannot survive, because they will shortly wear out the consent of those people they hate to be governed.
Tyrannies only survive by lies and force. And a tyranny foisted on the American people by the likes of Joe Biden, Ron Klain, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg isn’t competent enough to carry out its plans. It will break.
4. Regime media and power is pushing the people to violence
And now there’s Merrick Garland, who had nothing to say about the Mar-a-Lago raid until a disturbed individual brought a nail-gun and a rifle to an FBI office in Cincinnati and was ultimately killed by law enforcement, giving Garland the pretext he wanted to go on television and decry the insurrectionists among us.
It was a humiliating spectacle for a free people and a continuation of a pugnacious attitude that is driving a spirit of rebellion rather than tamping it down.
It’s imperative that the patriots among the American people trust what’s left of our institutions and not resort to violence the way the Left does. Once the violence starts it’s impossible to say when it’ll stop.
But the Left and the Biden regime are daily driving the spirit of rebellion. The Mar-a-Lago raid, the FBI entrapment of those Michigan simpletons involved in the “plot” to kidnap that state’s governor, the clear provocations on Jan. 6 and the over-prosecution of those who entered the Capitol, the persecutions of Scott Perry, Jeffrey Clark, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Peter Navarro, and others.
And the coming indictment of Donald Trump. Hired Clinton thug Marc Elias took to Twitter to boast about how the Mar-a-Lago raid would disqualify Trump from running in 2024, when in a sane nation no one in a position of influence would even utter such provocations, but the Biden regime and its ruling-elite allies are giddy.
Regular Americans have ever had less confidence in the media and the ruling elite. A foul smell fills the air.
5. An openly two-tiered justice system is a recipe for chaos
That foul smell emanates from an obvious place: the putrid double standard every American can see in our justice system.
It’s impossible for a jury in our nation’s capital to render a fair verdict. That’s been shown multiple times. When Trump’s home is raided in search of documents already discussed with the National Archives and no warrant is presented to his lawyer for perusal, and two dozen FBI agents spend 10 hours rifling through his wife’s closets and underwear drawers while Hunter Biden boards Air Force One for a “family” vacation with the Big Guy, and while Eric Holder commits open contempt of Congress without consequence while multiple Trump administration officials are dragged out of their homes in leg irons for the CNN cameras on the same charges, while Eric Swalwell doesn’t even lose his committee assignment on House intelligence for sleeping with Chinese spies while Mike Flynn is bankrupted for a process crime, there is no rule of law in Washington.
Or anywhere the regime and its allies are in charge. From Soros DAs to the Hoover building, our law enforcement is corrupted and lost.
And a government that cannot or will not uphold the rule of law is a government that is no longer legitimate.
The Biden regime has in less than two years broken the legitimacy of the federal government. Monday’s Mar-a-Lago raid was only the grand finale.
God knows what’s coming in the encore. But the American revival to come will not include this Department of Justice as currently constituted.
It must go. It must be broken into splinters via congressional defunding and reconstituted smaller, with tighter jurisdictional limits and far better ethics.
It’s them or us. We must choose us. And if Garland and Wray don’t like it, that is immaterial.
