What does American-style tyranny look like? Here’s an example of an all-too-familiar trend: Merrick Garland, Biden’s AG, sent a memo to Christopher Ray, Director of the FBI, to enunciate investigations of recent parent protests at local school board meetings . There’s a lot to unpack here, but a gradual slide into tyranny is in the offing. The tactic at play is to threaten citizens with the long arm of the central, federal government – the FBI for God’s sake – where they have no conceivable legal and Constitutional interest, to intimidate unwelcome speech and bankrupt political opposition. It’s dastardly and Garland and any of the FBI who cooperate ought to be punished forthwith before it becomes part of the operational DNA of our now unleashed Leviathan. “I was following orders” was no defense at Nuremberg; it ought not be here.
The flaunting of the Constitution is becoming too habitual. Some would like to trace it back to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, but that was blatant, out in the open, and the feds had no FBI to make the abuse readily operational; something easily undone by an election. However, the powers of the executive branch have grown exponentially. FDR had his enemies list; LBJ had his; and Nixon had his. But it’s more than that. The 21st-century feds through the executive branch meddle, control, manipulate, and intimidate themselves into all aspects of our lives. They have the people with the guns, an army of legal eagles, and a plethora of agencies to turn on an unwary citizenry.
The federal Leviathan got a second wind at their backs under Obama. A trip down memory lane would take us past the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case and the fed’s attempted prosecution/persecution of Zimmerman. A Florida jury put the kibosh to the effort. Ferguson erupted in 2014 and the feds under Eric Holder tried all he could to hang officer Darren Wilson but even he couldn’t find anything. And then there’s the IRS making their own enemies list of conservative groups (Remember Lois Lerner?). Of course, nobody was held to account but a “chilling effect” was accomplished in the interim. That’s how they work: success isn’t measured in prosecutions or in a variety of impositions but in scaring people away. Leviathan as bogeyman.
Lest we forget, do you recall those Obama-era “Dear Colleague” letters threatening schools that they had better shred due process and common sense or face the full force of the federal wolf pack? The message was clear: expediently thump any male accused of rape and open those girls’ bathrooms to any man claiming his genitals shouldn’t distract the female occupants from him being a woman . . . or else!
It begins with the fascination to make the law mean whatever you want it to mean, including the Constitution. Unleash the agents and lawyers and we’ll discover a legal rationale later. That’s the tactic. Call an event an “insurrection”, take your time investigating, raid homes and businesses with guns drawn, let the arrested languish in solitary for unspecified periods, and voilà, any more political embarrassment from the angry Trump voter is magically reduced. The feds discovered that it’s easy to bully the law-abiding working stiffs whose interaction with the law is the occasional speeding ticket in trying to get the kids to soccer practice on time. These aren’t your seasoned manacled occupants of chairs next to defense counsel before a judge.
You see, it’s all about whose ox is being gored . . . or intimidated. Hypocrisy is rampant. Andrew C. McCarthy, former US District Attorney of the southern district of NY, recounts Garland’s fastidious efforts in Clinton’s DOJ to protect the Constitutional free speech rights of fire-breathing Islamists like Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (him of the World Trade Center bombing of ’93) and his extremist coterie. But now spit and fume before your local school board about the racist indoctrination in your kids’ classrooms and you become a “domestic terrorist” and the target of the Patriot Act. Not only is this duplicitous, it’s vile.
When the Leviathan discovers that threats are enough, then there’s nothing that they can’t do. Eventually, an active citizenry is cowed, passive and inert, which is just what they want in order to make you into something that you have every right to not be. I’m not certain that we haven’t slid past good old-fashioned authoritarian tyranny right to the totalitarian kind.
RogerG