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Donald Trump’s decision to appoint two racist podcasters to lead the FBI was never going to work out well, and Director Kash Patel’s tenure has been as incompetent and humiliating as we could have expected. But behind the buffoonery and the scandals is the quiet transformation of one of our most important law enforcement agencies into another arm of the Trump administration’s repression machine, twisting the law and the truth in order to target minorities and build fictional narratives to justify an authoritarian crackdown.
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Earlier this week, the FBI was conducting a manhunt to find the perpetrator of the recent mass shooting at Brown University. Trump’s racism czar Stephen Miller’s equally horrible wife Katie Miller decided this was a good time to release a podcast episode with FBI director Kash Patel and his girlfriend, unspectacular country musician Alexis Wilkins, in which she interviews them about the ways his silly, trivial little law enforcement work interferes with their beautiful love story.
During the interview, Patel shrugged off criticism about him using FBI resources to go visit his girlfriend, saying that “If I was actually abusing it, I would go see every one of her shows. I think I get to like 15%.”
Unsurprisingly, this did not go over well in both social and legacy media, which were already on Patel’s case for once again prematurely declaring that the FBI had caught a suspect in the Brown shooting and then was forced to walk it back hours later. The perpetrator would later be identified thanks to a keen-eyed Redditor, as the father of Charlie Kirk’s killer did during Patel’s last manhunt. An avalanche of mockery and criticism followed.
“I know it’s stupid but I just can’t get over the Kash interview w/ his girlfriend while the Brown manhunt is happening,” conservative podcast host Saagar Enjeti posted. “It truly is one of the craziest, most narcissistic, and ridiculous things I’ve ever seen in Washington.”
Well, how’s Deputy Director Dan Bongino doing, you might be wondering? The answer is not great. After being forced to work a real job for ten whole months for possibly the first time in his life, Bongino is calling it quits and resigning. “I gave up everything for this. My wife is struggling. I’m not a victim. It’s fine. I’m proud I did this. But if you think we’re there for tea and crumpets...we’re there all day. I stare at these four walls all day separated from my wife in DC,” whined Bongino to Fox and Friends. Yeah, dude, it’s called going to work. We’d all like to spend time with our families all day.
One might think that after so many humiliations and such obvious incompetence, Kash Patel would soon be following him out the door. After all, Salon reports [ [link removed] ] that “according three different sources inside the FBI, the once-respected federal law enforcement agency is ‘in shambles.’ Morale is at an ‘all-time low,’ said one 30-year veteran, adding, ‘the cause is at the top.’”
But nope! Donald Trump recently reaffirmed his confidence in Patel, likely because Stephen Miller told him to. According to the New York Times [ [link removed] ], Stephen Miller wants Patel to stay because “he considers Mr. Patel to be a compliant purveyor of his directives on personnel and policy matters.”
In other words, Patel is a weak and obedient patsy who will happily implement Stephen Miller’s far-ranging campaign to manufacture a left-wing terrorist conspiracy in order to justify a totalitarian crackdown.
That campaign officially began with the Trump administration-issued directive called NSPM-7 on September 25th.
Officially titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” the memo orders all federal agencies to dedicate their efforts to target individuals and groups who exhibit any of the following indicators: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States Government, extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”
These indicia are so vague and unspecific that they encompass any and every political opinion or belief that doesn’t fit in Stephen Miller’s white supremacist worldview, and it is an obvious blueprint for prosecuting anyone who isn’t a diehard MAGA loyalist as a terrorist.
But in order to put lipstick on this fascist pig, Miller needs some kind of evidence of a widespread left-wing terrorist activity in the United States, which is of course where the FBI comes in.
Kash Patel, who obviously doesn’t care about being the FBI director beyond being able to wear the cool jacket [ [link removed] ] and taking the FBI jet to see his girlfriend, is exactly the kind of patsy Miller needs to produce the kind of “terror plot’ busts that will pave the way for him to roll back our freedoms one at a time.
That’s why we will have to put up with the besotted podcaster moron as FBI director for the foreseeable future while one of our most important law enforcement agencies falls apart at the seams.
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