Steve Friends, that is.
We’ll get to him in just a second, as this episode of the 5QT is brought to you by utter contempt for what the ruling elite is doing to America.
1. Meet a rare specimen — an FBI agent with a conscience.
Steve Friend is 37, and he’s been a respected FBI agent for 12 years. Or rather, he had been. Friend, a member of both the FBI field office and the SWAT team in Daytona Beach, refused to take part in a raid on the home of a Jan. 6 protester, and for his trouble he was cashiered. Now he’s turned whistleblower, and what he has to say is interesting — to say the least.
Per Miranda Devine at the New York Post:
Bombshell allegations by FBI Special Agent Steve Friend contained in a whistleblower complaint filed late Wednesday with the Department of Justice inspector general reveal a politicized Washington, DC, FBI field office cooking the books to exaggerate the threat of domestic terrorism, and using an “overzealous” January 6 investigation to harass conservative Americans and violate their constitutional rights.
Friend, 37, a respected 12-year veteran of the FBI and a SWAT-team member, was suspended Monday, stripped of his gun and badge, and escorted out of the FBI field office in Daytona Beach, Fla., after complaining to his supervisors about the violations.
He was declared absent without leave last month for refusing to participate in SWAT raids that he believed violated FBI policy and were a use of excessive force against Jan. 6 subjects accused of misdemeanor offenses….
“I have an oath to uphold the Constitution,” [Friend] told supervisors when he asserted his conscientious objection to joining an Aug. 24 raid on a J6 subject in the Jacksonville, Fla., area. “I have a moral objection and want to be considered a conscientious objector.”
Friend, who did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, said he told his immediate boss twice that he believed the raid, and the investigative process leading up to it, violated FBI policy and the subject’s rights under the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial and Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment….
Friend says his concerns are shared with large numbers of rank-and-file FBI agents across the country who believe they are being used as pawns to pursue the political agenda of the bosses in Washington, DC.
These kinds of abuses of the law are a “morale killer” for field agents, he says.
Many agents, who joined the FBI in the wake of 9/11, are keeping their heads down because they are close to their 20-year retirement with full pension. But he says they are equally disgusted at being forced to take part in the politicization of federal law enforcement.
A grateful nation thanks Agent Friend for his candor and his conscience, but this column does take issue with the last bit.
Our Founding Fathers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the cause of the new country that day in Philadelphia in 1776. These guys won’t put a pension into the pot to keep America’s Constitution intact?
Color me unimpressed.
Either stand up for your country or go screw yourself. The FBI as currently constituted and run is a clear and present danger to American liberty, and it certainly is no bulwark against runaway crime across America. How can you be a member of that organization and object to its politicization and transformation into a secret police force but say nothing because of a pension?
Maybe if the Republicans are allowed to retake Congress in November — assuming the not-so-loud FBI conscientious objectors with pensions in the lurch aren’t mobilized to interfere with the midterms — they can put together some sort of legislation barring the loss of benefits to FBI agents who refuse to violate the Constitution. How you write that bill, though, I’m going to defer to someone far more skilled in such matters.
Even so, legislation can’t fix a poisoned national character. And if the FBI is full of careerists who won’t risk their shiny pots of lucre to refuse to do the wrong thing, then we don’t need it or them. Break it up into pieces, keep the ones that can still aid a free society (like the crime lab), and re-source the police power to the states who rightfully have it under the Constitution.
2. Stacey Abrams, flailing sad clown.
A few days back here at The American Spectator, David Catron catalogued some of the many deficiencies of the conspiracy theorist and serial grifter Stacey Abrams, who lost the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia by more than 50,000 votes and spent the whole of Brian Kemp’s term in office denying her defeat. Catron rightly noted that Abrams isn’t going to do any better this time, and his take is validated by an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll, which has Kemp thrashing her, 50–42.
Catron couldn’t have known that Abrams would self-immolate within two weeks of his column; that’s pretty much what she did Wednesday:
Stacey Abrams: "There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks. It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman's body." pic.twitter.com/ukWdFQ2WLk
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) September 22, 2022
Of course, the abortion industry and their paid-shill allies, like the Washington Post’s “fact checker” Glenn Kessler, have concocted the narrative that there’s no such thing as a “fetal heartbeat,” that this is just “electrical activity” that an ultrasound picks up.
To which RedState’s Joe Cunningham confessed that he’d become perplexed:
You can choose to believe the medical professional or the fact checker. But, apparently, not both. pic.twitter.com/898hWUNjyN
— Joe Cunningham (@JoePCunningham) September 22, 2022
One wonders what the censors of Big Tech will do with this. Will Abrams lose her Twitter account because she’s guilty of “misinformation”?
Or will she just lose her election badly enough that she won’t be able to claim she was cheated?
3. Whither Lindsey Graham’s abortion bill?
I’ll say it — I’m not a fan of the 15-week abortion-ban bill Sen. Lindsey Graham brought earlier this month, though I didn’t throw a fit over it like some others did.
I generally had the same reaction that Bill Busse had over at RVIVR:
Frankly, the bill is quite compelling. The language and conclusions rely almost entirely on factual medical data relating to the development of an unborn child during different stages of the gestation process. After reading the bill in its entirety, it’s hard to imagine anyone arguing that a fetus with eye and finger movement, brain waves and internal organs isn’t a child at 12 weeks, but that’s a discussion for another day.
The issue with introducing this bill is the timing. For some inexplicable reason, Republicans routinely set off a grenade in their own camp just before the battle is about to begin, and this is another perfect example….
This is the exact reason we consistently lose national elections. There is a time to stand on principle and a time to focus on political expediency. For some reason, the Republicans don’t seem to understand the difference in the concepts.
I didn’t think it was a huge deal because the bill is never even going to get a committee markup. And my main objection to it is that we need a whole lot more federalism in this country, and the victory in Dobbs ought to be sellable on the basis that states are sovereign and should decide these issues for themselves — and that means Republican restraint as well as Democrat restraint.
Busse’s complaint is that this is bad politics. I think it would have been much better politics if Graham’s bill were about outlawing third-trimester abortions, a proposal that would really smoke out how extreme the Democrats are.
But there have been some opposing views that have some merit on this issue.
For example, the editors at the New York Post had this to say in support of Graham’s bill:
The only serious major question is when to draw the main line. And polls suggest most people would put it at about 15 weeks, 3½ months along.
That’s also where nearly every other advanced nation bans most abortions. As Scott Johnson noted in The Post, it’s 12 weeks in Denmark; “France, 14 weeks; Sweden, 18. The world average is about 13 weeks.”
Around 90% of US abortions now happen before 15 weeks, by the way (the Centers for Disease Control puts it at 98%), so that limit (with the exceptions most people support) isn’t remotely extreme.
That’s fair, but it’s still not as good an argument as the federalist case is.
Another way to truly smoke out the Democrats’ extremism on abortion would be to bring a bill or an amendment funding research into fetal incubation with an eye toward making unborn kids viable at younger and younger ages. The better medical science gets at doing that, the more you can make abortion obsolete — at some point you just have your OBGYN go in and get the little guy or girl, stick him or her in the newfangled incubator our tax dollars helped to create, and then let the hordes of would-be adoptive parents line up to pick up the tab and then take that kid home when the time comes.
That’s a political trick box for the Democrats. The rational thing — particularly if you believe in that safe, legal, and rare line they’ve been spinning at us for all these years — is to get behind such legislation. But if you do that, you’re agreeing to use tax dollars to break Planned Parenthood’s business model — and Planned Parenthood is the sugar daddy for the whole Democrat Party.
But going against this kind of bill is the stuff of dreams for GOP message-makers. That’s an indefensible position, so long as our side manages not to screw it up.
4. Kennedy to the banks: “You’ll never win the ultra-woke sweepstakes.”
This was just too good not to share. Enjoy.
5. Thank you, Matt Walsh.
This man is rapidly becoming a national treasure. He has completely blown up Vanderbilt University’s medical hospital for the has-to-be-criminal practice they’ve developed of pushing kids to mutilate themselves, motivated by profit alone:
BREAKING: My team and I have been investigating the transgender clinic at Vanderbilt here in Nashville. Vanderbilt drugs, chemically castrates, and performs double mastectomies on minors. But it gets worse. Here is what we found. Let's start at the beginning.
— The Honorable Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 20, 2022
Vanderbilt was apparently concerned that not all of its staff would be on board. Dr. Ellen Clayton warned that "conscientious objections" are "problematic." Anyone who decides not to be involved in transition surgeries due to "religious beliefs" will face "consequences" pic.twitter.com/CgNicrG4Mg
— The Honorable Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 20, 2022
Vanderbilt makes their Trans Buddies available to children, too. They make lots of "services" available to children, including chemical castration. Though at some point in the last month they removed explicit admission of this fact from their site. Here's the archived screenshot pic.twitter.com/X9nBpSxTC1
— The Honorable Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 20, 2022
After they have drugged and sterilized the kids, Vanderbilt — as explained in this video presentation by plastic surgeon Julien Winocour and Physician’s Assistant Shalyn Vanderbloemen — will happily perform double mastectomies on adolescent girls. pic.twitter.com/SRvtytflsk
— The Honorable Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 20, 2022
They now castrate, sterilize, and mutilate minors as well as adults, while apparently taking steps to hide this activity from the public view.
This is what "health care" has become in modern America.
— The Honorable Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 20, 2022
It’s an excellent practice, when you see the Left mainstreaming activity that is wholly inexplicable in rational terms, to put on the most cynical hat you can find and then look under the hood for the sleaziest and grubbiest explanation — because you’ll find it there.
The Keystone XL pipeline was initially killed in large part because Warren Buffett, who owned President Barack Obama, wanted to keep a monopoly for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad in transporting Canadian tar-sands oil. And the corrupt medical profession is pushing transgenderism because it’s a way to bleed patients dry for their entire lives — you’ll never be healthy again if you allow them to mutilate you under the guise of “gender affirmation,” and, therefore, you’ll be funding trips to Hawaii for the clinic staff ad infinitum.
Walsh has smoked that out. Statewide bans on transgender surgeries and puberty blockers for minors should follow in every red state (and perhaps some blue ones, too), and the glorious, ruinous lawsuits should flow like wine.
At some point it might be time for some real health-care reform from the conservative side. But it probably won’t look like the corporate-shill weak sauce we’ve been getting for the last 15 years. How something like this could have been allowed outside of San Francisco is tough to understand, but it’s in Nashville, for crying out loud.
