When in the course of human events...

These opening words of the Declaration of Independence set the stage for the American Revolution.  Now they must guide the nation as it grapples with the knowledge that many of our government agencies have become craven and corrupt tools of a cancerous cabal bent on consuming us all.

It is the actions of the FBI — and the other Deep State denizens — that have led the nation to the point of needing to think hard about the damage that has been done and the specific remedies afforded the public in the Declaration, including:

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

The guards have run amok.

This is not a call to replace the "public" government, but a demand that the "private" government — those pockets and levers and shadows and conveniences and personal grifts and malignancies it uses and evinces and schemes to enhance its own power — be, finally and permanently, dismantled.

What occurred in Florida Monday — the raid of the home of a former president under sealed reasoning — is so viscerally shocking as to be nearly inconceivable.  It should not, however, come as even the remotest of surprises.  For the past seven years, a war has been waged against a duly elected president.  For the past 113 years, nearly everything the FBI has done has been leading to this day.

J. Edgar Hoover infused the agency with his own tastes, predilections, and theories, much to its detriment.  From rather early on, the agency engaged in — at best — dubious practices, even as its hand-in-glove relationship with the media allowed its public stature to glow and grow.

But while people were watching G-Men get the bad guys on television and in the movies, the FBI was engaged in practices such as creating personal confidential files on people Hoover thought might not agree with him, illegally wiretapping phones, blackmailing politicians, slandering various leaders and activists, letting killers like Whitey Bulger simply wander away, squashing inconvenient investigations, and even denying the existence of the mafia.

One of the most notorious episodes in the sordid history was COINTELPRO, an agency-wide program to infiltrate agents into domestic organizations and movements across the political spectrum, eerily reminiscent of today (only the targets have changed).

The FBI has power because the people who give it money — or are coerced into giving it money — allow it and expect the favor to be returned.

Just in the past few years, the FBI has pushed the Trump/Russia collusion hoax, spied on Americans, lied to obtain warrants, ignored the alleged blatant corruption of the Bidens and the Clintons, deemed parents who speak at school board meetings extremist threats, and either persecuted or pampered journalists based upon how they report about the agency.

And the utter contempt Director Wray showed for every elected official — and the voters who put them in office — in America by cutting short his testimony before a Senate committee meeting so he could get on his taxpayer-funded private jet to go to his country house in the Adirondacks should tell everyone everything he needs to know about exactly how untouchable the Deep State believes itself to be, about its dripping disdain for the public.

The institutional rot is not confined to the FBI; the ATF, CIA, NSA, etc. have all proven themselves as far more adept at serving their power interests than doing their day jobs.  Each and every element of the nation's intelligence apparatus must be — metaphorically — deloused, sprayed with a fire hose, and put in solitary until all of them prove both their honesty and worth.

There is a saying in politics (and elsewhere, one assumes) that goes, "If you are incompetent, you have to be honest, and if you're evil, you should at least be competent."

The FBI — and the other slithers of the Deep State — fails at both.  The only thing it's ever been good at is scheming to make sure its political "masters" — once and future — are the ones it chooses.

That must stop today.

Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore and a former newspaper reporter.  He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at planbuckley@gmail.com. You can read more of his work at  https://thomas699.substack.com.

Image via Flickr, public domain.