The Real Threats to Democracy...

...are not what the Washington Post wants you to think.

I was 16 years old when, in June 1963, George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door to attempt to deny entry to four black students. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach from the Justice Department, backed by federalized National Guard troops, ordered Wallace to stand aside. After giving a bit more of his segregationist speech, Wallace complied. It remains one of the most vivid and uplifting TV images of my adolescence.

That was a big day for America. It was also a big day for me. For the first time in my life, I had at least a semi-realistic glimmer of what I wanted to do — work in the Justice Department. I didn’t have a really good idea of what DOJ lawyers did, mind you, but I knew that if they were doing that, I wanted to be one.

Even before that day, I admired what the Justice Department and the FBI were doing. The FBI in particular was not merely respected but revered. It went after the bad guys — bank robbers, kidnappers, the Klan. Now it was part of the forces that helped children just do with they had a right to do — go to school — and overcome the injustice and cruelty of segregation. That’s what DOJ/FBI did as far as I could see. They had nothing to do with politics that I ever knew about.

It was thus that I read the news of yesterday’s John Durham report (here) with not just sadness but something approaching grief. To see the FBI fall so far, to line up with schemers and con artists to try to undermine the President of the United States, was like watching a part of my youthful idealism die. Maybe I’m too old to be feeling something like that, but I did.

Of course my feelings will be of only limited interest to readers, except perhaps to those who grew up with the same happy and hopeful outlook. What’s more important is the reality of what the FBI has become.

Which is what, exactly?

It’s one of the things the Washington Post and other liberal outlets are constantly warning about — a threat to democracy. The Left tells us, contrariwise, that these threats emanate from right-wing extremism; just other day, President Biden told us that white supremacists are the most menacing terrorist threat to the country (I’m so pleased that I can now breath easier about the Jihadist crew that killed 3,000 people on September 11).

It’s one thing to see New York City’s chubby DA abuse his power to go after the people he dislikes, be it Donald Trump or Daniel Penny. That’s worrisome. What’s a good deal more than worrisome is to see the most powerful law enforcement organization in the country, and probably the world, become part of a wannabe police state. “Police state” might be overstating the case, but not by much. Alvin Bragg is just doing banana republic political revenge; bad as that is, having the FBI try to undercut the President and manipulate (what was then) the next election toward its preferred partisan candidate is incomparably worse. As the National Review notes:

What continues to be mind-boggling…is that even after [the Steele dossier’s] allegations did not pan out, and even after Steele’s main source for the information, Igor Danchenko, told the FBI that the information was raw hearsay and rumor, exaggerated and even fabricated in parts, the bureau continued to present it in court months into the Trump presidency. At the same time, Director Comey gave provocative public congressional testimony in which he confirmed that the FBI was conducting an FCI investigation into Trump campaign ties to Russia (though such investigations are classified, and the bureau habitually declines to confirm their existence). Comey gratuitously added that criminal indictments could be in the offing.

But the whole thing was a fraud. Now frauds are not exactly unheard of in politics, but a fraud put together by the closest thing we have to national police, and put over on the country by them, is something new and chillingly sinister in our history.

This was one of the dirtiest political tricks in American history. The damage it has done to American trust in the FBI and our intelligence agencies is incalculable.

But as destructive as that is, the loss of trust in the MSM and, to be honest, the Democratic Party, is also a major blow to the country. And yes, I get it that conservatives already had plenty of well-justified doubts about both. But this is a different order of magnitude. It’s not just policy disagreements and slippery, misleading political ads. It’s about honesty at a much deeper level. Call me naive (as I’m sure some will), but it feels like something important, something undergirding our faith in national institutions isn’t there anymore. And there’s barely a whisper of regret.

Back in November 2021, Axios wrote, “A reckoning is hitting news organizations for years-old coverage of the 2017 Steele dossier, after the document’s primary source was charged with lying to the FBI. . . . It’s one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history, and the media’s response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid.”

Yes, “tepid” is one word for it. Did you blink and miss that reckoning? Have you noticed how much more careful, responsible, and cautious the world of big-time journalism is today?

For a lot of liberal elites, the belief that some sort of sinister power — Russia, and we can throw in Cambridge Analytica’s wildly exaggerated claims of being able to control the votes of Facebook users — manipulated the 2016 presidential election was the most psychologically soothing explanation for that year’s election results.

The Left’s malign influence in the FBI and the Justice Department; its attacks (verbal and physical) on judges and more broadly an independent judiciary; and its shameless lying about both, are three things eating away at American democracy. Would that the Washington Post could, or cared to, penetrate the darkness in which it helps these forces operate.