Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Patel Confirmed as FBI Director
Apart from Matt Gaetz at Justice, Donald Trump has gotten the people he wanted to appoint confirmed by the Senate. This includes the horrid trifecta of RFK, Jr. at HHS, Tulsi Gabbard as DNI and as of yesterday, Kash Patel at the FBI. Of these three, Mr. Patel poses the most immediate threat to America and American democracy. RFK may get everyone killed by disease, but that will take time. Ms. Gabbard may undermine national security, but no one is going to suffer for it today. Mr. Patel, however, can have agents kicking down doors before the close of business. It is clear he is going to make the FBI the kind of political police force J. Edgar Hoover had built and that had been dismantled over the years.
Mr. Hoover was director of the FBI from the 1920s to the 1970s and even got an exemption from the mandatory retirement age to continue in an office he never planned to give up. He managed that by collecting dirt on politicians, using FBI resources to do so. Who would vote against extending his time in office if he had kompromat on them? All the while, he denied there was organized crime in America, even as the Godfather was published and filmed.
Yale University Professor Beverly Gage won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2023 for her book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. She told the Christian Science Monitor a few months ago:
Hoover was a big institutionalist. He spent his whole career in government. He believed in the power and independence of the FBI. He loved the FBI. He probably loved the FBI too much, and came to see it as sort of the great protector of the American way of life.
Kash Patel, on the other hand, is kind of coming in with a wrecking ball. He has said that he wants to kind of reduce the independence of the FBI, make it much more responsive to the political needs and desires of the White House. And he really wants to, in a lot of ways, dismantle the bureaucracy that Hoover built. He has said that he wants to shut down the FBI headquarters inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
She added, ". . . Hoover, in some ways, invented how to use a big institution like the FBI for your own political ends. But the interesting thing is that he was not partisan, quite, in the way that he did it.
"Kash Patel is coming in and saying, 'I believe in Donald Trump. I wrote a children's book series about Donald Trump in which I call him King Donald. And I am here to do whatever Donald Trump wants me to do."
Mr. Patel has an enemies list, which he published in a book not too long ago. He denied it in his confirmation hearing, and new AG Pam Bondi lied when she told Senators in here confirmation hearing that there would never be an enemies list at Justice (of which the FBI is part).
These parallels, and divergences, can give one insight into what lies ahead. The FBI is going to be less a crime-fighting agency and more of a political enforcer for the MAGAts. Agents will find themselves dispatched to investigate people who have not committed a crime but who have run afoul of Mr. Patel and his boss.
With this shift, it is reasonable to presume the truly valuable things the bureau does (its labs are the best crime labs on the planet) will suffer as resources are moved to pursue the new mission of protecting the regime from the people. This will have far-reaching ramifications as the FBI even helps police overseas fight crime.
Most troubling of all will be the anti-terrorism work the bureau does. It will not be downgraded, nor will it be starved of resources. Instead, Al Qaeda and MS-13 will get a pass while the Democratic Party and the ACLU are investigated for potential terrorist activities.
This journal has maintained that America under Donald Trump will be sicker, poorer and dumber than otherwise. To that, one can add less secure and less free thanks to Mr. Patel.
© Copyright 2025 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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