by Matthew Boose
The unprecedented raid at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month has energized the Democratic Party’s embrace of authoritarianism. The real outrage, they say, is not that the raid happened but that people are disturbed by it. The messaging from top Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and FBI Director Christopher Wray is of a piece: Republican lawmakers risk inciting violence by questioning the raid and the bureaucrats who orchestrated it. Won’t someone please think of the unaccountable shadow government?
Unlike Garland and Wray, Trump and his Republican allies were elected by the people. It is a peculiar democracy indeed in which agents of the state can break into the home of the opposition leader without controversy. But Democrats fancy themselves enlightened “antiracists,” which they imagine gives them exclusive rights of control over the state in Our Democracy™.
The righteousness of the Left is a thing to behold. Consider Michael Hayden, a former CIA director who endorsed executing Trump over innuendo about “nuclear weapons” and the Espionage Act. Hayden, as it happens, also believes that the Trump movement is a terrorist threat worse than al-Qaeda. Go figure.
Hayden is not alone. After January 6, 2021, former CIA head John Brennan, another career spy suffering from Trump-induced derangement, gave his own take on Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”: the Trump movement is an “insurgency” and “unholy alliance” of “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians,” he said.
What do you do with insurgencies? Why, you crush them, of course.
Is it any wonder that Democrats have embraced the deep state? Democrats know as well as the Right does that the leadership of the FBI, Justice Department, and CIA are filled with leftist partisans who see Trump and his followers the same way they do, as an unacceptable threat to “democracy,” which is to say, to them.
We have no real information about the raid, but the Left is satisfied that Trump should be promptly put to death and that only Orange Satan’s “cultists” would take issue with this speedy justice.
As usual, the Left is substituting one of its childish, violent morality tales for true justice. The real threat to the rule of law is that a former president is under investigation by his chief political rival, and that the people have been told to shut up and stop asking questions about this dangerously unprecedented event. It is apparently our moral duty, as citizens of Our Democracy™, to trust the benevolence of the ruling party and its praetorian guard.
Setting aside the obvious political implications of the raid itself, its historical context is not flattering to the regime. The allegations of Trump’s criminality, of course, have been propped up by the same type of absurd claims based on anonymous intelligence leaks that drove the Russian collusion hoax. The latest is that Trump is keeping nuclear secrets in his sock drawer, or something of that nature. Yes, right next to the mythical “pee tape” we had heard so much about during his presidency.
As they clamor for Trump’s head, the Left has discovered a newfound love of the Espionage Act, a notoriously illiberal law that was enacted to crush anti-war protesters a century ago. How does Trump do it? It’s possible that the trigger-happy illiterates who comprise the BlueAnon constituency don’t know what the Espionage Act is, or that they just don’t care. It has “espionage” in the title, which means Trump is a traitor. That’s all we need to know.
“No one is above the law,” they say. But the law is not an abstract concept. It has to be enforced. In the hands of the Democratic Party, the rule of law has been corrupted into the rule of men. Oppose the regime, and armed guards just might break into your home. No, the regime doesn’t care if you are a former president. The “rule of law” does not make exceptions.
For all their grandstanding about democracy, Democrats have rejected rule by consent for rule by force. They are ready to use violence against their political opponents, as their bloodthirsty reaction to January 6 and now, the Mar-a-Lago raid, have made very clear.
Of course, rule by force can only be opposed by force. For Trump supporters, the raid proves that Trump is a persecuted dissident whose charismatic leadership is the one thing standing in the way of a leftist tyranny. What do Democrats believe will be the effect of convincing half the country they cannot vote the regime and its flunkies out of power?
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Matthew Boose is a Mt. Vernon fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter @matt_boose.
