You're Not The Ones Protected & Served
You're on your own
Links are at the end.
I may have used this photo before. I try not to be repetitive but it is something of an awesome scene. This is late December 2020, at Ehukai Beach, home to the Pipeline, a break best known for reliably producing glorious tubes, which this wave didn’t. It’s unusually large for Pipeline, perhaps 25 feet.
The next authoritarian president may enjoy better conditions
Late last year somebody leaked a list of past and present members of the Oath Keepers — members of which have recently been convicted of seditious conspiracy in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol — including current and former members of various government security services. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO),1 in cooperation with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP),2 produced a six-part report in December of last year about the overlap.3
Some of the people named in the list denied having ever been Oath Keepers members; others said they’d let their memberships lapse from lack of interest; still others said they’d misunderstood the aims of the group.
Unsurprisingly, Customs and Border Patrol agents seemed most receptive to the group’s recruitment pitch.
One agent, who said he teaches “advanced firearms and tactics,” wrote that there is widespread agreement inside his agency with the group’s aims, especially with its pro-gun rights, Second Amendment stance: “Most Border Patrol Agents are Oath Keepers, we just haven’t signed up yet.”
The agent, who requested that he not be named, told POGO that when he signed up with the group in 2014, it was based on their purported mission to protect the Constitution, but that he did little and let his membership lapse. “I never attended oath keeper meetings, or renewed membership. I am not the protesting type and that didn’t interest me at all,” he wrote in an email.
“The men and women of the US Border Patrol are naturally patriotic, more so than other federal law enforcement agencies,” he emailed POGO. “They take their oath of office seriously and feel a deep sense of protection and loyalty to our nation.”
Border Patrol agents were the ones accused of driving unmarked vans and wearing anonymized uniforms while kidnapping Black Lives Matter protestors off the streets of several cities.
The report also looks at Oath Keepers members in the Secret Service, Coast Guard, and Department of Homeland Security. The most obvious threat is that intelligence reports on far-right threats to government and other targets may circulate among government personnel with allegiances to the threatening organizations.
We’ve already seen this among local police forces acting considerately toward members of the Proud Boys and other violent far-right groups, and with great hostility toward mainstream protestors and sometimes journalists.
Finding supporters of far-right causes among the country’s military and government agency paramilitaries isn’t surprising. Those jobs tend to attract people who enjoy exercising control over other people, and who think doing so is God’s work. A cleverer president than Trump could nurture and direct what amounts to a nascent fifth column within our government.
Of course one can argue that the government is itself a fifth column working on behalf of corporations and billionaires against the public interest; just too permissively for some players.
A reminder: Robert Mueller prematurely beatified
Robert Mueller spent more than a decade at the helm of the FBI, serving under presidents Bush fils and Obama. Along the way, his agency committed thousands of affronts to the constitution and the law generally, which he routinely lied about or downplayed to Congress.4
Much of the lawbreaking the agency did was related to their use of National Security Letters, orders which allowed agents to vacuum up information about subjects without a warrant and without much in the way of justification, and to do so while compelling silence from the businesses and organizations producing the information.
Perhaps the most famous instance of this practice surfaced when the agency tried to compel Connecticut librarians to produce a list of library books borrowed while subject to a gag order; the librarians rejected both the records request and, ultimately, the gag order, appealing to the ACLU for help.5
Mueller was, of course, lionized by liberals when he was appointed to act as special counsel after then-attorney general Jeff Sessions recused himself from matters Russiagate-related. (Much the same happened when Obama appointed self-aggrandizing authoritarian James Comey as Mueller’s successor; he’d done one good thing more than a decade earlier, and liberals swooned.)
This is to say that the FBI are not your friend even at their best, and their best is not to be considered good, and the enemy of your enemy is not your fucking friend; they just have good PR people in the press. Yr. editor argued when Mueller was appointed that the last thing he wanted to do was take down a sitting president or lay the foundation for doing so, which turned out to be the case. Democrats make fun, rightly, of that Mustache Club guy’s investigation into the Russia investigation, but Mueller’s results in terms of indictments and convictions wasn’t much more significant.
And Mueller was always going to hell. For a while it used to be that Democrats recognized that the FBI and other national security apparatus agencies were mostly shitheads on the civil liberties front, but not no more, not no more, and not for a while.
Not your fucking friends, people. Not taking your best interests to heart. Question Authoriteh.
Today’s writing music
Shipping News, “Save Everything;”6 Eno & Hyde, “High Life;”7 The Raincoats, “Odyshape.”8
That, Comrades, is all I got. Consider socialism. If you’ve not already subscribed and you like what I do, please consider it. Free for all, pay if you want to help keep me whole, body and soul. Be well, take care.
There are two kinds of people: 1) the movers & shakers and 2) the moved & shaken.
I have to take mild issue with your comments on Robert Mueller as special counsel. His failure to advocate indictment of Trump was based long standing DOJ policy with respect to sitting presidents. His report and testimony while anything but dramatic was thorough in describing the acts constituting obstruction and Congress, had it the will, could easily have removed Trump from office for it.