With the vast expansion of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, you can bet that there are a lot of agents twiddling their thumbs and trying to figure out something to do with themselves, conscious that only political work, not hard-slog investigation, gets rewarded.

So this came out from Newsweek:

The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump's army of MAGA followers.

The challenge for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the primary federal agency charged with law enforcement, is to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliations—even though the vast majority of its current "anti-government" investigations are of Trump supporters, according to classified data obtained by Newsweek.

Which is laughable.

The idea that MAGA discontents -- having seen and experienced the judicial abuses against the January 6 protestors, including long imprisonment without trial, draconian sentences, abusive guards, zero medical care, and other third-world style "justice" -- would try the same foolish crowd- and-rally tactics to protest an electoral outcome, is nonsense. Nobody is going to do that given what could happen to them. The feds went after even innocent old grandmothers who were led into the Capitol by Capitol Police on January 6 and ended up with long prison terms.

The threat of terrorism from MAGA protestors is virtually nil. The characters who have foolishly made internet threats have been shot dead. There is no significant Internet talk of such violent revolution, such terrorism, no talk radio exhorting it, no activity at all, just a mass savoring of President Trump's poll numbers going up every time the White House hits him up with some charge intended to knock him out of the race. 

If the bureau were serious, they'd watch groups like antifa and Black Lives Matter, or whoever the successor of that group is. They got away with riots once, with zero consequences, they know they can get away with them again, particularly if they lose an election and President Trump wins.

Once upon a time, the FBI used to be a master observer of human nature, of behaviorial science, back before it went woke. So why would it put out such information through Newsweek, and yes they did put it out there, despite their protestations within the piece. It should be noted there have been no feverish denials, no condemnation against the reporter for taking things out of context, and not a right-wing source, which they wouldn't have. Given the damningness of the story, which clearly violates MAGA supporters' First Amendment rights, and puts the bureau in the role of the KGB, why would they let that happen? 

As journalists Dan Bongino and Sarah Carter have observed, most likely it's to intimidate MAGA supporters into not rallying, not saying anything, not voting if they can help it. It's a huff, a puff and I'll blow your house away threat which may or may not be given weight. It's also unseemly and probably illegal. The late CIA senior official, Dewey Clarridge, in his delicious memoir 'A Spy For All Seasons,' wrote a lot about engaging in these kinds of tactics, in his case, against the Palestinian terrorists. It's obviously in the intelligence playbook.

It's so false, so ill-founded, it's amazing. Best as I can tell, among the MAGA supporters, the tactic now is to go proactive, to win the election so convincingly the other side cannot cheat their way out of it, and to stop the cheating before it starts. That explains the popular moves toward cleaning up voter rolls, seen by groups such as Judicial Watch, and others, and the surge of interest in becoming election observers.

Once the election is won, the plan will be to clean up the FBI, to restore it to its former glory and professionalism, ending its politicization and Gestapo tactics. For that alone, perhaps the FBI should be thinking twice before targeting MAGA as its own category of terrorist. You'd think they'd have that sense of self-preservation, much as we see internationally as various leaders have begun to calculate for a Trump win and adjust their stances accordingly. What it tells us is that the FBI's fanaticism has cut into its ability to calculate three chess steps ahead of the game. That suggests they may be that far gone and ripe for reform.

Image: RawPixel // CC0 public domain