Unsurprisingly, FedFest 2021 Fizzles - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Unsurprisingly, FedFest 2021 Fizzles
by
Capitol police at the Justice for J6 Rally. (MSNBC/Youtube)

About a decade ago, I had a visit from the FBI. It was about something I’d written that the Democrat Party’s political elite didn’t like.

The current attorney general of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, has put on an annual fundraising event which has been one of the better calendar items in all of American politics since he started putting them on as a congressman in 2011.

If you’ve ever watched Swamp People, you know that in Louisiana the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries issues a limited number of permits, tags, they’re called, for people to hunt alligators in a season which roughly corresponds to the month of September. Landry saw a great opportunity in that, and turned it into a three-day fundraising extravaganza operating out of his fishing camp on a bayou east of Lafayette.

That event has become a big deal. Among the attendees who’ve made their way to the swamps of St. Martin Parish in recent years to join Landry and help him build a war chest many think will be the key to his becoming governor in the 2023 elections are Donald Trump, Jr. and Kimberley Guilfoyle, Mick Mulvaney, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Jeff Duncan, Trey Gowdy, Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, and Kristi Noem. Landry regularly hauls in a million dollars from the gator hunt; it’s become such an institution in Louisiana politics that the state’s Democrat governor John Bel Edwards tried, and failed, to copy it.

The alligator hunt isn’t controversial in any way, shape, or form in Louisiana. People here recognize gators for what they are. They aren’t majestic creatures possessing mystical qualities, they’re nuisance animals. An alligator coming on your property will wreck your landscaping, destroy your fence, and possibly break into your house. It’s a grave threat to your pets. In exceedingly rare occasions, it could be a threat to your life, as an unfortunate man in Slidell, Louisiana, found out during Hurricane Ida; it appears he was killed and eaten by an alligator.

But when Landry, as a member of Congress, put on the first Swamp People-style campaign fete, an obnoxious leftist congressman from New York City by the name of Ackerman; I can’t remember his first name and don’t really care to, put out a statement trashing Landry for the cruelty of the gator hunt.

This guy Ackerman, whose first name is irrelevant, was known for wearing a big flower boutonniere on his lapel like this was 1935. Certain fashion trends die out and it’s a shame; that’s one which desperately needed to die out as a matter of man-card hygiene.

Given all of these items, I wrote a post at my site The Hayride which, in tongue-in-cheek fashion as a Modest Proposal, indicated that Landry should take it easy on the alligators and put on a hunt for a specific douchey Democrat politician instead.

And two FBI agents, who clearly didn’t want to be there, showed up at my doorstep to ask me about it. As politely as I could, having been advised in social conversations with people involved in the justice system never to let the FBI in the house without a warrant, I informed them the interview would take place on the porch and I told them the obvious — I was offering absurdity to match that of Rep. Boutonniere.

Which they already knew, and quickly the conversation shifted to the early-season prospects for LSU’s football team before their departure. One of the agents slyly told me after the fact that he read my site daily and loved it.

I’ve got no beef with the rank-and-file agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Most of them are patriots and professionals doing a job.

But some idiot in the middle echelons of that agency got a phone call from some political hack in Congress or the DNC, and the two guys sent to my porch were dispatched to teach me a subtle lesson: poke fun at the ruling elite, and they will poke back at you.

A lot of Americans already knew that before January 6. Now, everybody does. Hundreds of thousands of people who were rightly outraged at the 2020 presidential election showed up in Washington that day for a reason. They were there to exercise their First Amendment right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Hundreds of them attempted to assemble, peaceably or otherwise, within the U.S. Capitol on that day. Some percentage of them did enter the Capitol. Many of those were even expressly allowed in by the Capitol Police.

And a goodly number of those found themselves arrested. Dozens have been rotting in prison without bail or a trial for as much as eight months’ time now. Word is many of their trials won’t take place until spring or summer of next year, which is a pungent example of an off-the-books suspension of habeas corpus by a ruling regime that has validated every concern of the January 6 protesters.

Did some of those people abuse the right to assembly and petition? Sure. What happened at the Capitol could accurately be called a riot; it got out of hand, and some of those arrests and criminal charges were not beyond the pale.

But eight months in, it’s a hell of a challenge to find anyone in January 6 jail whose charges, which aren’t insurrection or sedition but rather a trumped-up version of trespassing, would merit more than time served in stir.

Everybody knows this. Even the Democrats are embarrassed about it. Which is why Nancy Pelosi continues to act in a batshit-crazy fashion over the January 6 protesters, claiming they were murderers and revolutionaries.

If the political stripes were reversed here, those protesters in January 6 jail would have already been freed, lionized and made millionaire grandees of the Left.

But what happens when someone gets the idea to hold a rally to remember the political prisoners in January 6 jail? You already know. You knew before it happened on Saturday.

You knew, and so did everyone else. Show up at that rally and you go on a list, and you’re almost certain to be harassed by either the media, counter-demonstrators, or the men Nancy Pelosi sends to intimidate you.

President Trump said what everybody knew when asked about the rally by The Federalist last week. “It’s a setup,” he said, further stating that if nobody showed up, that would be taken as the public not caring about the Biden-Pelosi regime’s political prisoners, and if people did, the regime would make them out to be terrorists.

The former happened. The media was there, for certain, and so was law enforcement. Regular Americans stayed away in droves, and rightly so. It’s a shame, because whatever you think of the January 6 trespassers, their treatment by this government has long past outstripped any injury they might have done to “democracy,” or whatever it is Pelosi purports to defend these days.

But we’ve reached a point in American history in which the Left no longer allows the Right space to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances. That’s “terrorism,” so you’ll know, and it’s the singular threat to our society.

It might have been styled as a “Justice for J6” rally, but what it really amounted to was FedFest 2021. It seemed like better than half the attendees were undercover feds, some of whom were caught in a meme-worthy set of still photos which will go down in history to the FBI’s humiliation, and might just rebrand Abercrombie & Fitch as Abercrombie & Fed.

Only a few people were arrested at FedFest, including a man carrying a gun. And he was a fed who showed his badge to the black-suited stormtroopers sent to sweat in the hot sun waiting for the “terrorist” rallygoers to make a false move. He was escorted away without incident or consequences.

The whole thing was a farce. A tragic farce, like everything else the Biden-Pelosi regime has touched in the eight months their political prisoners have spent in the federal fun house without trial.

The rest of America won’t be going to rallies or protests. The rest of America is going to college football games. Those “F**k Joe Biden” chants which get louder from the stands each week give you the real measure of what we think of the regime.

Scott McKay
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It's All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
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