If there is one thing the Chinese regime excels at, it’s the dissemination of lies. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a long and unglamorous history of destroying, or attempting to destroy, people's lives. Falun Gong members know this only too well. Lies, in the hands of the CCP, become weapons of mass destruction. This is common knowledge. After all, this is China, and China is ruled by a totalitarian regime. Dogs bark, cats purr, and despots do despotic things. Thankfully, in America, thousands of miles away, nothing like the CCP exists. Well, almost nothing.
Last fall, as you probably remember, a group of domestic terrorists plotted to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the 49th governor of Michigan. The plan, we’re told, was to abduct Whitmer, then transport her to Wisconsin where she would be tried for treason. This story was wild, ludicrous on so many levels. A Coen brothers movie playing out in real life. But some journalists like Michael Tracey, for example, weren’t convinced. A tenacious commentator, Tracey poked numerous holes in the FBI narrative.
Then, on July 20th, Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison, two reporters at BuzzFeed News, came along and blew the whole narrative apart. In a truly glorious piece of investigative journalism, readers were presented with the unvarnished truth. The FBI appears to have orchestrated the whole affair. According to Bensinger and Garrison, a number of “informants, acting under the direction of the FBI,” played leading roles in plotting the kidnap. “Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects.” No, they were heavily involved. In fact, “they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception.” The reporters wonder “whether there would have even been a conspiracy” without the FBI’s involvement. The answer, one imagines, is no.
Fear Based Initiatives
Why would the FBI go to such great lengths to orchestrate the kidnapping of an elected official?
It’s all about fear, and doing everything possible to keep fear alive. As the always excellent Glenn Greenwald recently wrote, “the FBI has previously acknowledged that its own powers and budget depend on keeping Americans in fear.” Greenwald discusses Thomas Fuentes, a man who served as the Assistant Director of the FBI for four years. When asked about how the FBI receives funding, Fuentes once said the following:
“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”
Although the source of fear changes from year to year – from Saddam Hussein to the Taliban to ISIS – the flame of fear is very much alive. Ever since Donald Trump burst onto the political scene in 2015, though, the flame has been doused with gasoline. A mere flicker is now an American wildfire.
To understand why, one must first accept the fact that the FBI is no longer an apolitical agency. The Whitmer “plot” demonstrated this clearly. The goal was simple: to make Republicans look bad. Not just bad, but inhumane, cruel, vindictive creatures. People capable of doing unspeakable things. With the politicization of the FBI, right-leaning individuals have become enemy No. 1.
Skewed Narratives
My grandmother used to tell me to do something every day that I didn’t want to do. When I was younger, this meant doing homework. Today, it involves watching MSNBC for a full 60 seconds. Interestingly, there you will find Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who, some five years ago, started the whole “Russian collusion” narrative. Although he was completely wrong, that hasn’t stopped him from becoming an MSNBC regular. Remember, this is the same network that gave Rachel Maddow a platform to spread collusion misinformation for years on end. Members of the FBI, both past and present, appear to have an intimate connection with left-leaning outlets.
At least with the CCP, we know what we're getting. There is, after all, a Ministry for Propaganda.
In America, however, citizens are being offered lies masquerading as truth. As the journalist Peter van Burren opines, this is no laughing matter. Then again, what are we to expect? In its 113-year existence, the FBI has always had a complicated relationship with truth. As Douglas M. Charles, a professor of history, notes, J Edgar Hoover, arguably the most famous (or infamous) FBI director in history, “worked to satisfy the political interests of some presidents and secretly undermine others.”
By satisfying “the political interests” of some elected officials, but not others, Hoover was satisfying “the political interests” of some Americans, but not others. Today, little if anything has changed. As Billy Binion writes in Reason magazine, the fact the FBI continues to deceive Americans “still inspires disbelief,” but it shouldn’t. As Binion warns, the agency instructs employees "to bend or suspend the law and impinge on the freedoms of others" when they see fit.
Like skilled contortionists, the FBI bends the law in the most discomforting of ways. The agency, in many ways, has become the Cirque du Soleil of truth, and this is why the American people should question everything. The Whitmer case is just the latest example of FBI deceit, which has been occurring for decades. It's a shame that the American people can no longer trust the FBI, an agency whose motto reads, 'Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.' Words, though, are incredibly cheap.
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